In 1989 Cooper and his friend David Chyan designed a first-of-its-kind gridless pc-board router that took the printed-circuit-board design world by storm. At a time when board area meant everything, the company they launched in Cupertino, Calif., CCT, created a shape-based gridless router that let designers squeeze nets close together for maximum route density.

Roughly six years later, the company held the lead in the pc-board routing market and then set its sights on the highly lucrative market for IC routers. Within months of releasing IC Craftsman, CCT began to muscle in on Cadence Design Systems' lead in IC place and route, eventually nudging Cadence into purchasing CCT for a record $480 million in 1996.

Now living the high life by splitting his time between homes in Pebble Beach, Calif., and Scottsdale, Ariz., Cooper is nurturing another startup. He believes the online EDA tool-distribution business he co-founded, and of which he is chairman and a major investor, will have the same impact on design as CCT. Cooper, along with friend Ben Franklin, initially launched EDAconnect.com with the intention of creating Web-based floor-planning and autoplacement tools that could be distributed easily and maintained via the Internet, driving down sales infrastructure costs and allowing the company to reinvest in tool development.

"We were developing the online infrastructure for the tool when we came up with a concept called the EDAstore," Cooper said. "The Web site and licensing package were so good we decided to slow down the tool development and put most of our resources into developing an e-marketplace focused on EDA."

EDAstore essentially rents third-party vendors' tools on a per-month basis. Customers license and download tools from the Web site and run them locally on their own PCs or workstations. The company is working on licensing schemes that are even more flexible so that customers could, for example, rent tools on a daily or perhaps even hourly basis, if participating tool vendors approve.

Cooper said the company chose the direct-download route over an application service provider (ASP) model, in which customers access tools running on the vendor's Web site, because the bandwidth does not yet exist to effectively move very large amounts of data via the Internet. Further, most users still worry whether ASP models are secure.

Cooper doesn't see ASPs like Toolwire as competition. "They are product companies really, they are licensing tools in a bundled hardware package, where we are really building a new marketing and distribution channel for EDA," he said.

Cooper noted that EDAconnect typically would sell lower-cost EDA tools serving the pc-board, FPGA and ASIC design arenas but leave the licensing of higher-cost, more complex tools to EDA companies' direct sales forces. "There are also big maintenance and upgrade issues with high-end ASIC tools, and for those you want to deal directly with the vendor," he said.

Cooper said the design community is just starting to take a serious look at Internet-based design solutions. But the online industry needs to reach critical mass, he said, before members of a geographically dispersed design team can work together effectively via the Web.

"Designers are still waiting for the tools and capabilities to become available," Cooper said. "A lot of Web solutions are still vaporware. People can visualize how it should work but in reality it is hard to achieve. I think, in time, we are going to see large groups of people able to work together more efficiently. The tools and many of the techniques have yet to fully mature to allow this environment to be stable and productive."

Still, the customer demand for licensing and using tools over the Internet seems to be stronger than ever. Yeffi Vanatta, director of the IC group at startup InViso, a developer of microdisplays and personal information devices for mobile information access, heartily endorses time-based licensing. Vanatta's four-person IC design group licenses the Cohesions IC schematic entry tool through EDAconnect.com.

"We checked with Cohesion and a full license of the tool runs $4,000," Vanatta said. "We only use schematic entry for a couple of months in the design cycle, so renting it for $100 a month is great for us."

Vanatta said she would also like to see the large IC EDA-tool vendors follow suit and offer their tools via the Web on a short-subscription basis. "There are parts of the design cycle like design rule checking, place and route, and synthesis where we only use these tools for a couple of months," she said. "The yearly licenses on some of these tools are hundreds of thousands of dollars."

Vanatta said that for a small startup like InViso, which develops and maintains two or three ICs, it is not cost-effective to pay such fees. In fact, she said high back-end tool costs have forced the company to send designs to third parties for layout. "When you do this you don't really know who is going to do the layout and when they are going to get to your design," she cautioned.

"The EDAconnect model is great for pcb and FPGA and small IC tools, but what I'd really like to see is the bigger tool vendors like Cadence, Synopsys and Avanti offering their tools through an ASP model," she said. "That way we would have access to the right tools when we need them and be able to access them from anywhere. Juggling yearly licenses and making sure they are current when you need them is a big hassle."

"There is no doubt the old EDA licensing model is breaking down," Cooper concurred, "and that users want licensing that conforms to their needs."

Cooper believes EDAconnect's approach is flexible but also practical for this stage in the Web's development. He noted that 18 EDA vendors, Zuken being the largest, have signed EDAstore as an alternative sales channel. "We have a bunch of contracts signed and are planning to add even more companies to the site in the near term, but it takes some time to integrate our licensing and those kinds of things," Cooper said.

At pc-board design-tool company Zuken, which began offering its Cadstar line of products via EDAconnect in June, "There has been strong demand from the user community for subscription licensing and delivery models," said Marc Ashton, Zuken's marketing chief. "EDAconnect had technology that allowed us to respond quickly to this demand."

Ashton said Zuken's product line is listed with competing tools on many Web sites, but EDAconnect is the first site that allows users to purchase its tool directly.

"The mainstream sector of the market has always been price/performance sensitive, and EDAConnect's marketplace allows customers to compare products easily," Ashton said. "We believe that Zuken's price/performance will stand out, making it the natural choice."

Ashton said revenue from the EDAconnect channel has not yet materialized, but that there does seem to be a lot of user interest in the concept. "We expect this to grow as the awareness of EDAconnect builds," he said.

Meanwhile, Cooper said EDAconnect is developing a tool support infrastructure for the third-party tools it hosts. The company is creating a variation of the "Ask Jeeves" online resource center, naming it "Ask Ben," after company president Franklin.

"It is an exciting technology, and we think that support is really going to be a critical part of the Web site, especially since we are offering tools worldwide and need to support customer 24 hours, 7 days a week," Franklin said.

The company has signed on several international partners in Europe and the Far East. They host EDAstore offerings locally and translate materials into the local languages. In addition to tools, EDAconnect has just started offering design services through the site. The first member is SiQual, a design house specializing in high-speed board design. EDAConnect takes a small cut for brokering design-services contracts, but the company claims its design service is just an added feature for EDA users and does not see it making significant contributions to EDAconnect's overall revenue.

The company is also in the process of securing news feeds from electronics publications. "We think the EDAstore is going to be a true marketplace, where engineers can purchase stuff they need or at least find out what new tools are available," Cooper said.