CMC Microsystems, https://www.cmc.ca (formerly Canadian Microelectronics Corporation), is a non-profit organization that “enables and supports the creation and application of micro- and nano-system knowledge by providing a national infrastructure for excellence in research and a path to commercialization of related devices, components and systems”.
Part of that support provides subsidized CAD tool licenses to universities working in microelectronics, electromagnetics, photonics, and other research areas, mainly in Electrical/Computer/Mechanical Engineering. Faculty members who wish to participate (i.e. to get licenses for CAD tools) must subscribe to CMC services for access to CAD tool licenses, as well as to CMC-assisted fabrication of microchips or micro-fluidic or photonic devices. Subscriptions allow CMC to find which of their services are useful to university researchers. Details on faculty member subscriptions are available at https://www.cmc.ca/subscriptions/. Faculty members can subscribe (currently at $1000 per year – Nov. 2021); note that ECE has an institutional “Research Plus” subscription, which means that faculty members who subscribe can use unlimited numbers of concurrent licenses for most tools, rather than a cap of five users per subscribed professor.
For some of the CAD tools (from Agilent, Altera, Xilinx), the licenses are hosted on servers on our campus. For other CAD tools – notably from Cadence, Mentor and Synopsys – licenses are hosted on CMC-operated servers. There are two potential problems with off-site hosting: network connectivity to distant servers, and inability for university staff to view details about local usage. CMC addressed the first of these by changing from a single license host to multiple license hosts across Canada, in Kingston Ontario, Ottawa, and Alberta. To address the second issue, CMC has set up a tool allowing some university staff to view some of the data about usage.
The typical process to gain access to CAD tools follows:
- faculty member must create a (free) account at CMC, at https://www.cmc.ca/MyAccount/GetAccount.aspx
- faculty member must subscribe to CMC services https://www.cmc.ca/subscriptions
- grad students and other researchers supervised by the faculty member must create a (free) account at CMC, at https://www.cmc.ca/MyAccount/GetAccount.aspx, and must indicate who supervises their research. (Staff members and other visitors who need access to the tools must also create an account and find a subscribing faculty member willing to add them to their CMC account.)
- faculty member will be notified by CMC that a researcher claims them as supervisor
- faculty member must confirm supervision
- Once confirmed, the grad student or post-doc must run a Java program, “CADactivate”, at https://www.cmc.ca/access-with-cadpass-cadactivate/ to gain access to specific tools. This adds the researcher's login name to the “options” file of the FlexLM license servers operated by CMC. Researcher using different login names on different computers on campus must run CADactivate from each of those different computers, so their login name on each one can be added to the FlexLM license files.
If you have questions, please contact Jaro Pristupa (jaro@vrg.utoronto.ca).