A LEADING SUPPLIER of Windows-based EDA software and services, OrCAD, has announced significant Internet e-commerce alliances.

The Beaverton, Ore., company has partnered with Marshall Industries and Digi-Key to provide free component data via its OrCAD Design Network (ODN) site. Marshall is one of the largest distributors in North America, and Digi-Key is a Web-based component distributor.

The three companies will provide design engineers with real-time pricing, availability, lead-time, specification, symbol and footprint information on electronic components. Access to these new data sources and types is in addition to the OrCAD products' built-in Web access to the 500,000-part ICSelector component database.

OrCAD is also offering its database tool Wizard, which will allow creation of a central and preferred-parts database for use by an entire design team.

TUESDAY, JUNE 23 at 10 to 11 a.m. PDT: Cypress Semiconductor and E.N.E.N., a Web-events company owned by Marshall Industries, are offering a Web seminar focusing on the Universal Serial Bus (USB), a new PC-to-peripheral connectivity standard .

CIO MAGAZINE'S Web site, which focuses on chief information officers and IT and senior management executives, offers discussion areas on several related topics.

"THE MAXIMUM number of addresses you could have is about 4 billion-32 bits-and we don't have that many assigned right now. We probably have about 50 million. We won't run out of those until perhaps 2005.

"With a 128-bit address space, every electron in the universe could have a Web page. The fact of the matter is that 2,128 is only 1,038, and the number of electrons in the universe is probably more like 1,080 or 1,088, so I'm only off by 50 orders of magnitude [laughter]."

-Vint Cerf, senior vice president, Internet architecture, MCI

TEAMSHARE INC. (Colorado Springs, Colo.) offers TeamTrack, a tracking system for software development teams that tracks and prioritizes defects, customer requirements and changed requests during projects.

BLUE WAVE SYSTEMS (Dallas and Leicestershire, England), a DSP board vendor, has a site that features info on its popular PowerPack products.

THE INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY ASSOCIATION of AMERICA (Arlington, Va.), a consortium of 11,000 members in the IT industry, has a site. Find out the ITAA's role in related policy issues, including taxes, intellectual property, telecommunications law and encryption.

THE INTERNET ENGINEERING TASK FORCE has formed a working group to bring order to myriad Internet-commerce protocols. Based around the Internet Open Trading Protocol, which is intended to encapsulate a variety of payment systems including Secure Electronic Transactions, CyberCash and DigiCash, the consortium has a new site at.

THERE'S A NEW CONSORTIUM in town. This one is concerned with the long-term success of corporations running mission-critical applications on the Internet. The Open Group (Cambridge, Mass.) is committed to the "development and implementation of a secure and reliable information-technology (IT) infrastructure," and its 200 members include everyone from Apple to Visa.

It's a timely organization with an informative site-especially in light of a recent International Data Corp. (IDC) study that found that big industry players, such as banks and health-care organizations, aren't yet trusting mission-critical applications to the Internet.

What is needed is Net compatibility with existing computing systems-the "heritage infrastructures" that currently handle most business information.

One solution proposed by the group is the "IT DialTone" initiative, an attempt to create a global standard for Net infrastructure products, which, when settled on, will give an official Good Housekeeping-style seal of approval.