An Advanced Infrastructure for Collaborative Engineering in Electronic Design Automation

Engineering collaboration gets its new global dimension with the omnipotent access to Internet. Engineers have severe requirements concerning: security of design data, quality of net connections, easiness of collaboration, etc. This article presents visions and middleware architecture to establish pan-European col- laborative engineering infrastructure and its application in the field of Electronic Design Automation (EDA). We present a transparent infrastructure to engineers to enable their Internet-based collaboration during the de- sign of complex electronic systems. In thi s context, we introduce an advanced collaborative infrastructure (ACI) for distance spanning, tool integration, and administration as well as open interfaces for XML-based data exchange. ACI constitutes a backbone for our collaborative research and engineering studies by fostering a combination of most recent plug-and-play technologies and secure, peer-to-peer data transfer with XML- based tool integration. ACI and its deployments have been developed with the EU project E-Colleg (IST- 1999-11746).