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by sybreon
5857 days ago
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With a web-app like this, I would be concerned about IP issues. Half the industry is banking on IP unless they are open-source like the OR1K. Otherwise, a proprietary house might be hesitant to upload HDL code even if it is over a secure SSL connection. For simulation with Icarus Verilog, it might be possible to upload the compiled VVP binary. You can sell your computing power as a utility (ala cloud computing) and help people save cost from buying an expensive server and save time from having to wait days for results. For FPGA selection, I personally doubt that your tool would be that useful because this decision is primarily dictated by the cost of parts - rather than the specific features. The hardware business is very cost-driven. What you can do is to provide customers with the ability to perform synthesis over multiple architectures for the purpose of 'testing' that their code works on them all. |
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It may very well be the killer for this webapp, and we don't have a good technical solution at the moment. However much we encrypt, the customer's IP is going to sent to our Cloud anyway.
This reminds us of Dropbox in a way.
The non-technical "trust" factor seems to be very important here. Why would one trust a consultant or a design service company with one's IP? Because of a legally-binding contract and because of reputation / past interaction? That probably plays a big part.
Some strategies we came up with:
If users don't trust us with their most important IP, we'll ask for their not-so-important IP.
A support person probably has to meet the customer on a day-to-day basis, which would somewhat defeat the purpose of a webapp, at first.
Yes, we would be selling computing power in a sense. But we're also trying to do more to simplify working with FPGAs.
It's true that cost of parts is very important; that's why we're working on reporting chip cost and availability too. Octopart is very helpful in that respect!
Thanks for your comments!