As the high-tech industry emerges wounded, but wiser, from the first dot-com experience, it is clear that the Internet remains an important communications medium. According to market research firm Collaborative Strategies LLC, revenues for real-time collaboration tools and services are expected to grow to $6 billion by 2005.

As design teams get larger and more geographically dispersed, using this medium for collaboration becomes even more important. To ensure design success with distributed resources, management will make improving productivity across distant engineering sites a top priority. Real-time, Web-based design collaboration is key to optimizing productivity.

However, because remote engineering collaboration is much more complex than business collaboration, where a "standard" application such as PowerPoint works on a "standard" computer platform such as a PC, certain factors need to be considered to successfully share design information across platforms.

Data security for protecting quickly becomes a major concern. True control and security of corporate data can only be maintained when the information resides on a company's internal server. Once a third party is introduced into the corporate network, holes can be opened and security breached. Absent a well-defined collaboration solution, a workaround is to take a noninteractive snapshot and e-mail the information to team members, or to copy the design database across multiple sites.

Cross-platform compatibility is another must-have for optimum online tool collaboration. Although many of today's EDA tools run on Sun/Solaris machines, others perform better on HP machines or on PCs running Linux. Thus, the ability to collaborate over multiple platforms is crucial. Say a Silicon Valley design manager working on a PC wants to conduct a design review of a Los Angeles engineer's timing simulation done on a Sun machine. Simultaneously, each of them would like to check the verification results from a Linux farm provided by another engineer in Boston.

Clearly, the EDA industry needs collaboration technology that is platform-independent, with no compromise in security, but lets engineers share information across design sites.

Emerging Internet and browser technology is enabling the creation of such networking infrastructures. The best approaches will use both independent browser-based and standard EDA design tools for quick, easy desktop sharing, remote access and online conferencing. One such solution, SpaceCruiser, allows synchronized, real-time viewing and desktop sharing. It provides the ability to securely access and display gigabyte physical databases in seconds.