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DAILY NEWS AND INFORMATION
FOR THE GLOBAL GRID COMMUNITY / JUNE 30, 2003: VOL. 2 NO. 26
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Systems/Enterprise:
IBM LAUNCHES ON DEMAND
ENVIRONMENT TO VERIFY CHIP DESIGNS
IBM announced a ground-breaking service for chip designers and verification
engineers to improve productivity and quality -- providing services and tools
on demand for chip design and formal verification.
The new technology services offer chip designers a hosting environment that
reduces the overhead and maintenance associated with the purchase, set up and
update of expensive engineering hardware and software.
On demand services for chip design and formal verification will reduce the
cost of maintaining an entire library of design and verification tools, a
significant financial expense for all chip designers.
By shifting focus away from IT infrastructure complexity and cost recovery,
this new engineering model enables design organizations to rapidly respond to
changing business needs with less resources.
"It will virtually change the way engineers get their job done," said Pat
Toole, general manager, IBM Engineering & Technology Services. "This is a
ground-breaking service because, for the first time, it combines immediate
access to some of the world's foremost verification expertise, a secure
collaborative infrastructure over the Web, and affordable licenses for
advanced tool design and verification that can be added -- on demand -- to
accommodate the fluctuating hardware and software demands of design
teams."
This new offering, created with the help of IBM's Haifa Research Lab, is
already benefitting students at the Technion Israel Institute of Technology-
-one of the world's foremost technological organizations. The on demand
environment offers the students immediate access to IBM's leading-edge formal
verification tools as well as secure collaboration with chip manufacturers and
IBM's team of technical experts.
"Using the new working model established by E&TS and exemplified in this
project, we can significantly extend the accessibility of engineers worldwide
to our verification technologies, which will now be available to users on an
on demand basis, over the web, leveraging IBM's e-business hosting center,"
explains Dr. Michael Rodeh, director of the IBM Haifa Research Labs.
Students at the Technion's VLSI (very large system integration) design lab
can
securely sign in and gain access to an IBM Web portal, and once inside the
portal, hosted at an IBM e-business Hosting Center in New Jersey, access
tools that help them with the design of the chip and formal verification, the
process of mathematically proving that every circuit in the chip, no matter
how complicated, works according to its specifications.
"By working with IBM, we are getting access to IBM's leading-edge
verification
technology and infrastructures, specifically the E&TS web-based hosting
environment which supports the project," noted Dr. Ran Ginosar, head of the
VLSI department at the Technion. "By exposing our faculty and students to new
ways of doing engineering -- namely verification on demand -- the Technion has
become the first academic institute worldwide which educates students to this
engineering model."
The students are involved in a secure, real-time collaboration on actual
devices with chip manufacturers and IBM's worldwide team of design and
verification experts, not only in Haifa, but with other parts of IBM's
worldwide organization, as well.
IBM's formal verification tools have been long recognized by engineers
worldwide as a leading edge, but they have not been accessible as a service to
other companies in this way, on demand, via a Web portal, until now. The
availability of IBM's tools to engineers at large is now significantly eased
by virtue of fact that these tools support the industry-standard language PSL
for requirements specification, which is based on IBM's Sugar 2.0 language.
PSL has been recently selected as an industry standard by the Accellera EDA
standards organization.
This service for chip design and formal verification enables engineers to
collaborate from a Web browser on Unix, Linux, or Windows platform. Using web
conferencing, they can instantaneously design with other users to debug and
fix design problems in real time. All communications between the client and
server are completely secure and offer a robust high performance mechanism to
protect sessions from network instability.
This EDA portal is an excellent example of how IBM is providing new,
innovative technology to customers and backing it up with immediate access to
consultation and support whenever needed.
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