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Membership

The full Europractice membership of KIT includes the software service as well as access to IC design libraries and IC manufacturing services. The official contact person for KIT membership (Europractice Representative) is Prof. Dr.-Ing. Ahmet Cagri Ulusoy (IHE).

Usage and access

Institutes wishing to use Europractice software or other services must nominate at least one long-term contact person for this purpose. These persons will then receive a Europractice entitlement and can obtain software, license files and other information from the Europractice portal.

The following applications, among others, can be obtained via Europractice:

• ANSYS HFSS, Redhawk and PowerArtist.
• Cadence
• ClioSoft
• Coventor
• Intel Quartus
• Lumerical: discontinued on 31.12.21 by ANSYS
• Mentor Graphics
• Synopsys: as of 01.01.23 not part of central KIT software portfolio
• Xilinx

License server

SCC operates the following license servers for products from the Europractice program:

Note: Synopsys will no longer be provided centrally via SCC as of 01.01.2023. However, a personal license of Synopsys can still be obtained via the Europratice portal.

Background

Already during the 1980s, the EU Commission in Brussels, together with a group of European universities, started a training action with the intention to put the training of microelectronics engineers in Europe on a broad basis. The background to this training action was the assessment that Europe had been lagging behind its world market competitors in the field of microelectronics for years. One of the reasons for this was that the purchase and maintenance of EDA (Electronic Design Automation) software for computer-aided design of integrated circuits (ICs) was often prohibitively expensive at the time. For the EU Commission, the prerequisite for improved opportunities for European electronics products on the world market was therefore a more favorable training situation for microelectronics engineers, i.e. in particular better equipment of universities with EDA software.

In 1989, the EU then took the initiative together with interested European universities and created an institution under the original name EUROCHIP, which was to enable first European universities, and later also medium-sized industrial companies, to use EDA tools. Through Europe-wide agreements with the suppliers of EDA software, a common European procurement and the use of subsidies from Brussels, the acquisition conditions could now be arranged in such a way that for research and teaching in the field of highly integrated circuits, EDA tools are now available in sufficient numbers at many universities and research institutions.

Since its foundation, the EU initiative has experienced a continuous upward trend and in 2005 counted more than 600 European universities and research institutions among its members.

Due to economic constraints, the EU Commission finally felt compelled to make changes to the extensive set of agreements on October 1, 1995. Since then, the initiative has been called EUROPRACTICE (PRomoting Access to Components, subsystems and microsystems Technologies for Industrial Competitiveness in EUROPE) and now has only one contact point for each service throughout Europe (previously 6). The Rutherford Appleton Laboratory (RAL) in Great Britain is responsible for software supply, the Interuniversity Microelectronics Centre (IMEC) in Belgium for IC production, IC test equipment and the supply of technology description files (design kits), and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU) for the Europe-wide course offering.

At the University of Karlsruhe (TH), nine institutes and the Computing Center came together in 1993 with the intention of jointly acquiring membership in EUROCHIP. This was then done with effect from 1.7.1993, so that since then each of the affiliated institutes can acquire EDA software and even have sample copies of self-developed microdevices manufactured at portable conditions (in so-called MPW runs, MPW = Multi-Project-Wafer). As planned from the beginning, this membership was transferred to the whole university on 1.7.1997. Since this time all institutes can use the software offers and services of EUROPRACTICE in the same way. Today, more than 90 licenses of microelectronics design software are available in 10 institutes for the development, simulation and, if necessary, testing of ICs. For several development projects, these are supplemented by technology specification files (design kits) for manufacturing processes, as they are now also offered by European IC manufacturers (IC foundries) (pitch, for example, 1.5, 0.35 or 0.18 microns).