A Web Services based Approach for System on a Chip Design Planning

The concept of Virtual Organisation (VO) offers various solutions to management, collaboration and coordination issues important for distributed collaborating teams. Deployment of this concept to distributed electronic system design has been addressed in this paper. The article introduces an organizational model of a VO dedicated for System-on-Chip (SoC) design and an architecture of the supporting ICT infrastructure that has been based on the Web Services technology. The developed multi-tier distributed application supports interoperability of heterogeneous computer systems belonging to dispersed design partners. Implementation issues, as well as the experiments verifying the utility of the solution for SoC design planning are shortly reported. 1 Challenges in collaborative design of SoCs Integrated circuits that incorporate whole electronic systems including microprocessors, memories, input/output interfaces, and other peripheral elements on one silicon structure are referred to in the literature as Systems-on-a-Chip (SoC). Due to rising complexity, strict “time-to-market” constraints, and heterogeneity of components, design of a SoC constitutes a challenge. It has been observed that the basic approach based on “design reuse”, like Intellectual Property (IP) components-based design, needs to be strengthened through new technologies enabling collaboration in large distributed teams. This tendency is rising and since mid ‘90s is recognized as a new discipline named collaborative engineering. This new engineering paradigm becomes feasible due to more and more powerful Collaborative Working Environments (CWEs) that profit from recent achievements in information and communication technologies. Collaborative engineering is a cooperation of spatially dispersed engineers who as members of one distributed design team, work together towards a common goal. Their cooperation which is based on the Internet is virtual, highly flexible and gives them possibilities for fast communication, design data access, and information exchange. This form of distributed engineering can encompass large and distributed design teams. It can be thus viewed also from an organizational perspective. The very first examples of collaborative engineering were reported by large global companies. There the performed collaboration