Hi Sunny,
The major EDA ISVs all seem to be reaching for the clouds. I spent 2yrs in Cadence Cloud Business Development and interacted with customers ranging from 10 employees to more than 100,000. As opposed to open file formats, the main message I heard was: designers want one cloud (rather than multiple) to set up, learn, and use. No one wanted a metrics cloud, a Cadence Cloud, a Synopsys Cloud and so on. They wanted one common cloud platform across all tool flows. They didn’t want to have a specific cloud for each EDA vendor, and given that the vendors do not allow their IP or software offerings to be hosted by a competitor, the ISV Cloud Initiatives will be hard pressed to gain mass proliferation and deliver the benefits of HPC in the cloud. Furthermore, the investment to create and deliver to the market a leading edge PAAS solution would require nearly upwards of $30M in development costs and the EDA ISVs serve only semiconductor customers so that investment would be next to impossible to recoup across a single market vertical.
When I left Cadence, I continued my passion to deliver the industry a cloud platform that can host all software applications and deliver the power of nearly infinite compute (constrained only by budgets and Parallelization efficiency of the applications). I had worked with PAAS providers while I was at Cadence, and I also spearheaded a partnership between Cadence and pure PAAS providers called the
Cadence Passport Program. My customers would commonly have mixed vendor workflows, so I wanted to find a PAAS that could help.
After much searching, Rescale was the only PAAS that fit the bill. Rescale naturally became the inaugural partner of that program.
In parallel to their work with Cadence, Rescale was deeply engaged with Samsung, as part of an initiative to bring
SAFE CDP to the cloud for Samsung Foundry customers. The SAFE CDP demonstrated an improvement of TTM of 30% for Gaon Chips.
Rescale is also an IN-KIND partner to
Silicon Catalyst and delivers the platform to Silicon Catalyst portfolio companies. As part of that program, design startups are given access to the program and some credits to be able to get started. This gives companies a chance to operate with resources way beyond what they could build on prem.
All of this hard work resulted in Rescale onboarding a majority of the market leading products from the Major EDA ISVs. Today, Rescale is able to offer the design community a rich portfolio of EDA applications all deployed in the cloud via a “bring your own license” usage model. The beauty of this approach is that the end user can simply set up a Rescale account, access preinstalled EDA software, point to their own license server (check with your vendor) and leverage the scale of the cloud for any design related activities. The time it takes for a new customer to initially log into the Rescale platform and launch a job is generally less than one hour. So the challenge of providing access to EDA software applications in the cloud has been solved.
The next challenge is to improve the flexibility of ISV licences, so more people can Reduce their TTM by 30% with compute in the cloud.
For example, if you needed to run 20,000 verification jobs that take an hour each on one core, you could do all 20,000 at once in the cloud with flexible on-demand style licenses, reducing your run time to just one hour. This kind of flexibility would allow companies to leverage additional parallelism when needed.
A business model change of that magnitude must be well thought out, so I wouldn’t expect anything soon. In other segments, the ISVs all ended up with improved revenue and happier customers, so there is clear motivation to go there. Rescale’s PAAS offering has a rich feature set to enable billing by usage so the technology is readily available if any of the EDA ISVs decide to make that move quickly there is no reason to build when you can partner.
In summary, the challenges with EDA software in the cloud are close to being fully resolved. Customers will need to lobby their EDA vendors to allow software to be accessed in time increments to align with compute access to in order for the industry to be able to realize the productivity of applying massive compute to regression runs, full chip STA, library cell characterization, LVS/DRC, OPC and other HPC tasks that are parallelized to run across 100s or 1000s of cores. Then the industry will be able to fully leverage the power of infinite compute to deliver massive TTM gains resulting in better silicon, sooner.
Now that engineers have access to all the compute power of the cloud, companies also need the ability to look at how resources are consumed, and budgets are managed. Rescale has worked with many of our customers and partners to ensure mgmt teams have full visibility into budget being spent and by which project and engineer. Check out:
.
The time to design in the cloud and beat your competitors to market is now.