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NEWS
Apr 17th 2000: An ASP startup is crashing the entry barriers to chip manufacturing by putting engineering design software online to rent. Instead of paying from $10,000 to $300,000 for full-price software licences, chip designers will be able to rent the use of equivalent applications online from Santa Clara CA-based Toolwire for just $15 to $60 for each job. The variable prices relate to the nature of the task and the complexity of the device being designed. The result will be a rapid expansion of opportunity for small electronics design houses and individuals, as well as a boost to the potential creativity of the industry as a whole, Toolwire's VP marketing Doug Marinaro told ASP News Review in a pre-launch briefing last week. "The economics of creating new electronic products is going to change," he said. "You're going to see an order of magnitude of new electronics companies and product offerings." Toolwire is supplementing the applications with an online skills marketplace, online learning and an online knowledgebase, to fulfil a vision that the company describes as Design Chain Management (DCM). Analagous to supply chain management, DCM enables the free flow of design information, skills and intellectual property through the supply chain from designer to manufacturer. The complete portfolio of online services was launched yesterday as the Toolwire DCM Network (see internetnews.com story, Toolwire Puts Electronics Design Online). Toolwire runs the service on a Unix and Windows NT server farm hosted at Frontier GlobalCenter, using Oracle8i as a platform for integrating the various applications and services. The ASP adapts established electronic design software for delivery across the Internet using Java applets. The first batch of applications are tools for designing custom chips, provided by software vendors Lucent, Novas, Synopsys and Triscend. Other providers are equally well-known names in the electronics design and manufacturing sector, including Avnet, EDA Planet and Questlink. Live oline collaboration facilities are supplied by WebEx. The Synopsys and Lucent tools, which are used to compile and download designs onto Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs), were launched as an initial service in December 1999. Indicating the strength of potential demand for the solution, an email sent out to a global database of 1700 designers resulted in 150 jobs being submitted to the site within the first forty-eight hours. Forty-six percent of users of the FPGA tools have been from outside the USA, Marinaro added. "[The user base] was immediately global".
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ANALYSIS
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