A prototype of Web-based middleware system for EDA tools sharing

Electronic design automation (EDA) tools are becoming more and more important for integrated circuit (IC) designers, while the commercial EDA tools are very expensive and most individual engineers can not afford them. However, the success and efficiency of IC design at present depends mostly on the plentitude of EDA tools and their resources. As the Internet boosts, it provides good opportunities for the individual engineers to share their intelligent properties (IP) and the EDA tools through Web system. In this paper, middleware technology is introduced into setup a prototype of Web-based system for the EDA tools sharing. It can be used to make business for application service provider to host the Web-based EDA servers as commercial platform. Any individual engineer can register as a member for using the expensive tools and selling the IP cores on the platform. There are several critical issues of the middleware in designing the prototype system. Here, we generalized them as: access control, protocol transformation, connection management, and so on. In order to analyze and spread our system, we review the existed Web-based EDA systems and details on all of the critical issues of our prototype system.