Collaborative Infrastructure for Distance-Spanning Concurrent Engineering

Design of complex Systems-on-a-Chip requires often integration of large teams of engineers who work in remote locations. Seamless and secure integration of distant tools across different organization over the Internet is still one of major challenges that obstacles efficient engineering collaboration. The paper explains the main element of the advanced collaborative infrastructure that supports integration of distributed engineering tools. It constitutes TRMS (Tool Registration and Management Services) which are scalable, easily accessible, secure, and available on different platforms due to their implementation in Java. Requirements on TRMS, its architecture and functionality, as well as conclusions stemming from first deployments are presented.