Upverter - Hardware design tools for the web

So in perspective the product is interesting, a collaborative tool. The pricing model seems a bit broken from an actual use case standpoint. Perhaps they could go to a 'price per private design' kind of thing.

[1] http://www.labcenter.com/index.cfm

I suspect you can innovate quite a bit on the HDL front and then doing everything server-side should really give you a cost advantage as well. I can also see the open source aspect of this taking off - a high quality of library of plug and play cores that can be seamlessly integrated into your designs might prove to be a significant competitive advantage.

My own application provides relatively high-level collaborative design functionality, and does not attempt to replicate the functionality of existing tools that are capable of very low-level simulation, analysis, and engineering. I imagine that it's a similar situation for hardware design, although probably with fewer tiers of software -- presumably Upverter users are working at a level that's much closer to the end result of the hardware-production process. Still, there must be existing (offline) design platforms with low-level functionality that you don't want to replicate in its entirety; these are presumably embedded in the workflows of existing hardware design houses in a way that will be difficult to supplant. Have you considered eventually producing plugins for these 3rd-party platforms, which would keep their designs in sync with the cloud-hosted model? This way, high-level design could be done in the browser, and low-level simulation etc. can be done in existing applications, while still taking advantage of Upverter's collaboration functionality.

This, of course, is my own long-range plan, although the web application is very much the initial focus. Just wondering if you've had similar thoughts, and if so, whether you've found such a strategy to have any particular merits or flaws that you'd care to discuss?

What support is there for hardware description languages? HDL is good for large projects and is more reusable than a schematic.

One suggestion is to have a component library that is shared among all users. Each person adds components as they need them, and the library grows, as a community resource over time. Maybe you have that already? If you do have it, what license covers the library? Is it covered by the same open source license as the schematics of the users that generated the library? In that case, is it free for any user to export and reuse in full? Such a feature would negate some of the "vampire" accusations leveled by the dangerousprototypes review.

What's the advantage over gEDA, gHDL or similar? Most people with the knowledge to design a circuit would also have the knowledge to set up a tool chain and repository. Who's the market?

The goal with Scheme-it to be an electrical engineering "Visio" type application.

http://www.digikey.com/us/en/mkt/scheme-it.html

one thing though - since you guys are after hobbyists and small design firms and it seems like it's a fairly small market with very little money to be made.

but it's very likely that you guys will be acquired by one of the larger CAD tool companies.

hardware design is not like software design because plenty of companies are already sell hardware building blocks that can be tweaked with software to develop an application. Very rarely you have to redesign hardware from scratch. These companies provide their customers (which include hobbyists/small design firms) with schematics. Their customers may tweak the schematics rather than designing everything from scratch, so collaboration may not be the highest pain point here.

I wonder though, does Upverter currently support low-level logic/CMOS circuit simulation? I know that's asking a lot out of a web app, but using Cadence for simulation is often overkill for most hobby projects, and I have yet to see a modern web app/startup that serves this niche.