There has been a great proliferation in the quantity and quality of online resources for IC designers over the past two decades.  This expanding set of options benefits both the designers and ecosystem partners such as foundries, tool vendors and IP suppliers.

For intellectual property (IP), multiple established sites deliver IP cataloging, news, planning and aggregation, and consulting.  These useful services come from established providers like ChipEstimate, Design & Reuse, and Silicon-IP.  Providing fast access to detailed information on thousands of IP alternatives helps build the market for IP innovators while providing designers with myriad technology solutions.

Web-based EDA solutions are also becoming more mainstream.  Many are ideally suited to the advantages that only online resources can deliver.  Examples include Cadence’s hosted design solution, Mentor’s thermal analysis, Synopsys’ logic verification and Nimbic’s electromagnetic analysis.  With seemingly unlimited compute power residing “in the cloud,” designers can have on-demand access to these types of scalable tools, eliminating constraints on their productivity.

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