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 collaborative 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 design of complex electronic systems. In this 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).