WP10 will develop and validate a system for acquiring and managing knowledge about electronics design (in terms of methodologies, processes, activities, actors, best practices, software tools etc.). This prototype system for the ACTIVE technology will be used by the design and customer support engineer community within Cadence VCAD Services.

Studying a number of different areas in electronics design will provide the opportunity to understand typical knowledge processes and derive requirements for ACTIVE technology and the software to be developed to enhance the ACTIVE technoology. The areas will include:

1. Analog, Digital and Mixed signal IC design of Systems-on-a –chip (SoC
2. IC package design
3. Printed circuit board (PCB) design

The tools used by the case study users will be generic desktop applications as well as specialized IC design software, whilst the user behaviour and the associated knowledge processes are likely to be representative for knowledge workers across engineering disciplines. Thus, although the case study participants are employed in the IC design sector, the results will be widely applicable beyond the boundaries of this engineering field.

The system will support knowledge workers in managing and sharing information; will provide them with the knowledge they need for the tasks they are accomplishing (design tasks, customer support, design support, to name only the sector-specific ones), and will guide them through the processes they are involved in by being aware of their context and learning to anticipate user behaviour and needs and to recommend certain actions. What the system learns about user context and user behaviour will be integrated with information provided by the users themselves, in terms of informal tags, and enriched through formal background knowledge of the domain of the case study. By formalizing these additional sources of knowledge the system will be able to automatically infer recommendations easing the knowledge worker the completion of complex tasks as those commonly encountered in the electronics design field.

In particular the European Cadence VCAD services group with its 130 engineers will contribute to the case study. Within this group there have been already some initiatives going on to formalize knowledge about engineering design processes, which resulted in the development of an ontology to describe those processes and associated items.

The case study will test the technology developed in the project, both from the technical and usability standpoints. The former will include testing the applicability and scalability of the software. The latter will include both the interaction between user and tools and also how the technology encourages and supports inter-user interaction. Another outcome of the case study will be demonstrations, presentations and white papers to support dissemination activities within the project.