It’s impossible not to enjoy a fast-paced conversation with Upverter co-Founder and CEO Zak Homuth. Upverter offers a collaborative, cloud-based PCB design tool, and now this month has added EE Concierge.

Homuth started our recent phone call by referencing a conversation we had in 2015: “It’s been a long, hard fight since that time, but our new product is working well and we are excited about it. With it, we are shifting our focus even more towards on-demand engineering.

“Our new product – EE Concierge, the Electrical Engineering Concierge Service – is an evolution of the real-time, on-demand, virtual assistant for PCB engineers that we experimented with back in 2015.

“Now it’s a completely separate product that can be used by any hardware engineer in the world, with any ECAD tool like Altium or Eagle [Autodesk]. It’s not just for Upverter users, hardware engineers today – the people responsible for every new device you buy – have their own team of engineering assistants.”

I asked Homuth to define on-demand engineering.

Below is a contributed op-ed piece from SmartFlow Compliance Solutions CEO Ted Miracco, and company AE Akshay Dhule.

I last spoke with Miracco in November 2015 when the company launched, offering tools and strategies to software companies who have lost product to theft and piracy. At the time, Synopsys was dealing with a publicly-acknowledged system breach, so that conversation with SmartFlow was particularly pertinent.

This current piece, however, is about export compliance, a topic also of intense interest to the EDA industry.

Cadence’s Larry Disenhof is the industry’s subject expert in this area. Having heard him speak numerous times, although the piece below ends with a plug for SmartFlow, Disenhoff would undoubtedly agree with an articulate reminder that export compliance is neither optional nor for the faint of heart.

The message is clear: If you’re running a software company, ignore these issues at your own peril.

Congratulations to SoC Solutions and Silvaco! SoC Solutions will soon be under the Silvaco umbrella. (See the news release, “Silvaco to Acquire SoC Solutions.”

As a member of the ESD Alliance, SoC Solutions recently took full advantage of the well-honed expertise of our Export Committee. In fact, as SoC Solutions found, anyone who doubts the value of the ESD Alliance or its Export Committee won’t after learning that the three-person group took on the U.S. Department of Commerce’s Bureau of Industry and Security (BIS) and won.

Yes, consider the Export Committee formidable. Made up of representatives from Synopsys, Mentor and Cadence, it was able to persuade BIS to change a small but important piece of the Encryption and Export Administration Regulations. “In our EDA world, we have one main exemption that my committee gained for the industry back in 2005 –– decontrolling our usage of encryption in the design cycle,” says Cadence’s Larry Disenhof, the chair of the Export Committee. Only in the last year has the main body of encryption regulations caught up with our exemption fully decontrolling ancillary encryption used in products from DVD players and household appliances to protection of IP in electronic design, he added. “Without this exemption, we would have been filing license applications constantly for the last 10 years.”