The evolution of the microelectronic domain marks a turning point with a dramatic growth of human resources. A mass of qualified personnel must be trained in diversified areas, more and more their training may long their whole professional life. Hypermedia techniques will widely contribute in the close future to teaching methods. This new challenge could turn very inefficient and costly if some objectives are not satisfied. Thus, the identification of the public concerned becomes fundamental to garantee a suitable training, a complete transformation of the lecturers and the courses "creators" will be necessary to engage them on the Hypermedia way, the design of these products will involve a wide range of constraints including fundamental and human sciences.

Teaching the design of basic systems is a fundamental and difficult part of an electronic course. Due to the number of components, the interaction between blocks, perturbations and performances become critical constraints here. This paper describes a methodology and an hypermedia solution developed at the LEG - EPFL (Electronics Laboratory of the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology). This solution assimilated to a virtual lab shows a good complementarity with traditionnal methods. The difficulties of such a project will be presented and a first feed-back will be analyzed.

A CAD tool dedicated to parasitic substrate coupling modeling and visualization is presented. A CIF representation of the layout and a specific technology description are used to extract a simple parasitic substrate coupling model. The output is SPICE compatible and includes a geometrical information that is used to show on the layout the distribution of the equipotential lines produced by a perturbing source. Results are compared with measurements and other simulators to demonstrate the accuracy of the model

A routing method for analog full-custom ICs which is applicable to a wide variety of circuits, including mixed analog/digital designs, is described. The router is gridless and performs electrical optimization at a symbolic level, before design rules handling. Electrical optimization includes crosstalk, resistivity, ground capacitance, and electrical symmetry. An expert system can be used as an option for handling specific constraints and to control the final results. Practical results are presented and discussed on the basis of several examples.<>