A two-tier distributed electronic design framework

We present the concept of a distributed, web-based electronic design framework. The salient feature of our system is the extension of the client-server architecture to two-tiers, with the web server serving client requests whilst acting as client to the tool servers. In the sample application of the framework, developed in Java, any of the servers can be based on Linux, MS Windows or SunSPARC server. The web server that has been used to demonstrate the framework for on-line access to VAMS (a VHDL-AMS parser) and Avant! HSPICE is currently available for Linux but has been developed with a truly platform independent implementation in mind.