Collaborative circuit designs using the CRAFT repository

This paper provides an overview of the CRAFT repository, which exposes a collaborative gateway enabling circuit designers to share methods, documentation and intellectual property. The main goal for the repository's development is to ensure that future designs for custom integrated circuits need not be reinvented for each design and fabrication cycle. This paper presents the architecture, design, and implementation of the collaborative repository, which capitalizes on the recent advances in production quality open-source collaborative frameworks, which are interfaced using a lightweight Javascript front-end to satisfy the requirements of the DARPA's CRAFT program. The repository has been developed as an EmberJS application (front-end), that interacts with an instance of the Open Science Framework (OSF). This paper contextualizes the framework from the viewpoint of circuit designers and outlines the advantages of the tools and visualizations offered by the repository, in terms of increasing the efficiency of designers’ tasks. To this end, we also provide a description of two specific tools that have been exposed using the repository, which build on JSON schemas and allow users to develop and visualize the circuit design flow diagrams and the intellectual property they can reuse to accelerate their design process.