But Barcelona Design's CEO, a small, energetic woman who hails from Barcelona, Spain, is used to unexpected career changes. And today, she oversees a startup that's breaking new ground in Web-based design as well as analog circuit optimization.

Although still in its infancy, Barcelona Design, located in Sunnyvale, Calif., has attracted accolades from some notable sources. Joe Costello, former president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, reacted with disbelief when he first heard of Hershenson's analog synthesis claims-and ended up as Barcelona's chairman of the board. Another skeptic-turned-supporter is analog guru Bob Dobkin, CTO at Linear Technology and now a major Barcelona investor.

Barcelona is an EDA company that does not sell a tool. You can't buy a CD containing Barcelona's software, and there's nothing to license. Barcelona is an application service provider (ASP) that provides its technology as a Web-based service.

Barcelona customers go to www.Barcelonadesign.com and select a technology and a topology, fill out a menu of parameters and specifications, and get a Spice netlist for a component such as an op amp. There's no payment until a netlist is printed out. A complete GDSII layout file is promised by the end of this year.

Key to Barcelona's offering is a mathematical approach, developed by Hershenson, that produces designs very quickly-in a matter of seconds or minutes. This lets designers run through dozens or hundreds of op-amp configurations until they find the one that's just right. Observers may question whether the technology is really "synthesis" as opposed to optimization, but Hershenson believes it can have the same affect on analog design that HDL synthesis has had on digital design.

"We want someone who is not an expert to be able to come to the Web site, set some specs, and get a circuit," Hershenson said. "Sometimes people will spend a whole day and design 150 op amps before they select one. They're doing a lot of what-if analysis they couldn't do with any other method."

Barcelona is helping pioneer a new EDA business model that could be great for start-ups, said Gary Smith, chief EDA analyst at Dataquest Inc. "When you're in development, you can present your product on the Web, which means you can keep your code in-house," he said. "That means you can continue to develop and upgrade your code without having 47 obsolete versions in the field."

But Smith, a noted skeptic about the ASP model for EDA tools, said that Barcelona will ultimately need to turn to a more traditional business model. "It's a real good product, but it needs to be sold by a direct sales force with AEs. A true sell is going to be a corporate sell, and you don't sell to corporations over the Web."

Costello, who helped Hershenson come up with Barcelona's Web-based strategy, acknowledged that customer acceptance of the new model has been mixed. And he noted that many designers are running through lots of optimizations without actually printing out a netlist, which is how Barcelona currently receives its revenues.

"We are definitely in experimentation mode, and we have not settled on a business model yet," Costello said. "I think we'll end up with a mixture of things. We still want to stick with an ASP model, but some offerings might be better tapped as IP [intellectual property], and some might be better in a services model."

That's not to say that experimentation and fine-tuning is a bad thing. "What got me excited about this company is its willingness to throw out the rule book and try different things," Costello said.

Non-EDA background

Hershenson's openness to new approaches may stem partially from the fact that she never intended to join the EDA industry in the first place. When she came to Silicon Valley from Barcelona, she had a degree in electromechanical engineering, with just enough electronics, she said, to pass an interview at Linear Technology.

While at Linear, she started attending classes at Stanford University. Eventually she took a class titled "Convex Optimization for Engineering Applications" taught by professor Stephen Boyd, now Barcelona's chief scientist. "The class is normally taken by mathematics and statistics students, not circuit designers," said Hershenson, who said she enrolled in the class "by accident."

It may have been a happy accident for analog designers, because Hershenson had to complete a class project, and she came up with a "silly example" that applied a new mathematical approach to analog circuits. "It turned out that it can be used to design op amps or any kind of circuit," she said, sounding surprised even today.

Hershenson further refined her mathematical breakthrough into what became her PhD thesis. The day before she defended her thesis, she was meeting with the venture capitalists who helped launch Barcelona. Hershenson received her PhD in December 1999, several months after the company was founded.

When Hershenson started Barcelona, she didn't plan on offering a Web-based service. In fact, she said, she didn't know anything at all about EDA.

"When I met Mar, she didn't have any preconceived notions about how to run the business," Costello recalled. "She knew she didn't want to run a traditional EDA company. She was aggressively trying to find a different way to approach this marketplace. We started talking about the Web as a delivery vehicle, walked through it, and it seemed perfect."

"I needed to hear from someone like Joe that we could do it," said Hershenson. Dobkin was also supportive of the Web-based strategy. "By doing a Web-based front end, they can update it continuously, instantaneously for all their users," he said. "They can keep it up-to-date very easily, and it shortens the development time." Barcelona's product depends on frequent updates and additions-of circuit types as well as supported foundries and technologies-to reach its full value. Right now, only op amps are fully supported on the Web site, with inductors and resonators in beta test. Filters, comparators, and oscillators are on the way. The list of foundries and processes is continually growing. Most of Barcelona's 26 employees are designing new circuits or inputting new technology data.

Hershenson acknowledged that pricing is a "big challenge" that Barcelona has yet to resolve. Another issue that concerns some users is security. She pointed out, however, that Barcelona doesn't store any design data unless the user asks for it. Bandwidth isn't a big problem right now, she said, but may become more of an issue when Barcelona starts sending back GDSII layout files.

"I think the Web is a good delivery method for a lot of technology, but not for everything," said Costello. "You wouldn't go with an ASP model for a graphics editor. But for Barcelona it makes a lot of sense, because you don't use it all the time. The only thing that keeps us from moving to it is inertia."