International Business Machines Corp. said it's starting a program to use the Internet to speed custom-semiconductor design, bolstering its unit that makes chips for other companies.

IBM, the No. 1 computer maker and one of the biggest makers of application-specific chips, will set up a system so that chip designs are placed in a secure environment on the Web, where a customer's design team and IBM engineers can collaborate on the blueprints and make changes in real time. Designing custom chips, which are used to provide unique features that standard processors don't offer, requires time- consuming exchanges of details between the clients that provide a basic framework and the IBM employees that do the back-end work. Using the Internet will speed up the process and make plans more accurate, said Anirudh Devgan, who's running the project for IBM. The Armonk, New York-based company plans to offer the service to a pilot set of customers in the first half of this year, and later on wants to include customers who design the so-called system-on-a-chip devices that combine several functions on one chip, he said.