NEEDS (Nano-Engineered Electronic Devices Simulation) is a five-year NSF program charged to develop a suite of SPICE-compatible, compact models for emerging nanoelectronic devices. More importantly, NEEDS aims to create a complete model development environment (NEEDS-SPICE) to support the creation of high-quality compact models by technology developers and to provide designers with models that run robustly on both open source and commercial platforms.