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Broad cloud portfolio for development of electronic systems and semiconductors

Cadence Design Systems has launched the Cadence Cloud portfolio, the first broad cloud portfolio for the development of electronic systems and semiconductors.

The Cadence Cloud portfolio consists of Cadence-managed and customer-managed environments that enable electronic product developers to use the scalability of the cloud to securely manage the exponential increase in design complexity.



With the new portfolio offerings, customers gain access to improved productivity, scalability, security and flexibility, through scalable compute resources available in minutes or hours instead of months or weeks, achieving better overall throughput in the development process.

Broad cloud portfolio for development of electronic systems and semiconductors
The new Cadence Cloud portfolio is the first broad cloud offering for the development of electronic systems and semiconductors. It includes customer-managed and Cadence-managed cloud environments providing productivity, scalability, security and flexibility benefits that enable engineers to achieve electronic product design goals
Cadence gained extensive cloud experience by hosting design environments for more than 100 customers of varying sizes and architecting many of its products to be massively parallel for improved scalability in the cloud.

“The cloud will fundamentally influence silicon design by giving semiconductor companies the ability to optimisze their capital versus operational expenses for computing infrastructure,” said Suk Lee, senior director Design Infrastructure Marketing Division at TSMC. “Cadence has passed our rigorous cloud security audits and is authorised to engage with mutual customers on the Cadence Cloud using TSMC process models and rule decks.”

“While many industries have previously adopted the cloud to address compute-intensive workloads, systems and semiconductor companies have faced unprecedented challenges that have made cloud adoption difficult until now,” said Richard Wawrzyniak, principal analyst for ASIC & SoC at Semico Research Corp. “Some of the challenges included security concerns and the sheer amount of design data and the inherent scalability limitations with electronic design automation tools. The Cadence approach to the cloud addresses historical industry issues, opening the door for customers to adopt the cloud and enter the next generation of chip design development.”

Customer-managed environments

The Cadence Cloud portfolio includes support for customers who establish and manage their own IT and business relationships with Amazon Web Services (AWS), Google Cloud Platform (GCP) or Microsoft Azure.

The Cadence Cloud Passport model includes cloud-ready Cadence software tools that have been tested for use in the cloud, a cloud-based license server for high reliability and access to Cadence software through familiar download mechanisms.

The Cloud Passport model is well-suited for companies who have the means and expertise to manage their own cloud infrastructure internally.

The initial Cadence products that are cloud-ready and benefit significantly from the scale of the cloud include tools for circuit simulation, power and EM analysis, logic simulation, formal verification, physical verification, timing sign-off, extraction, power integrity and library characterisation. Additional tools will be available based on customer need.

The Cadence Cloud-Hosted Design Solution, also part of the Cadence Cloud portfolio, provides software tools in a fully-supported, managed and EDA-optimised design environment built on AWS or Microsoft Azure that has been customised for company-specific infrastructure requirements.

Cadence offers unique technologies, security and automation capabilities to enhance the usability and value of these environments.

For example, Cadence has developed a portal that easily provides cloud setup, maintenance and job management functionality in a rapidly deployable cloud environment to cover peak requirements in areas such as logic simulation and library characterisation.

Start-ups and small companies can benefit from a customised cloud environment because it reduces the need for capital infrastructure investments and certain computer-aided design (CAD) and IT expenses, empowering these companies to offload their entire design environment and instead focus entirely on IC and system design innovation.

Medium to large companies can also benefit from Cadence-managed environments by moving an entire design project, a functional domain or peak compute workloads from their own data centres to the cloud.

Additionally, Cadence introduced the Cadence Palladium Cloud solution, a directly delivered, cloud-based emulation solution that easily addresses peak needs of existing Palladium customers and brings emulation hardware access and benefits to new customers and markets.

With the Palladium Cloud solution, customers purchase gate capacity, which is used when needed.

Cadence maintains the emulation hardware in a professionally managed datacenter, freeing users from installation and operational responsibilities.

Collectively, Cadence-managed offerings support use at the tool, flow or entire design environment level. Customers can select the models and technologies that best address their unique requirements.

Cloud benefits for systems and semiconductor companies

The Cadence Cloud portfolio was developed to enable the following benefits for systems and semiconductor companies:

Improved productivity: EDA-optimised compute resources that enable engineers to achieve productivity improvements with the potential to deliver innovative chips and systems to market faster

Intelligent scalability: Enables the proper selection of the type and configuration of compute for chip and system design projects, scaling the infrastructure up and down based on need

Optimized security: Expands upon the native security provided by cloud providers with additional security layers, best practices and penetration testing

Flexibility: Includes Cadence-managed and customer-managed options to meet specific business requirements with a choice of cloud deployment options—AWS, GCP or Microsoft Azure. The Cadence Cloud portfolio can be customised to offload a peak need, part of a flow or a full project in any combination customers need.

“We’ve delivered the Cadence Cloud portfolio to address the challenges our customers face—the unsustainable peak compute needs created by complex chip designs and exponentially increasing design data,” said Dr. Anirudh Devgan, president of Cadence. “By leading this industry shift to the cloud, we’re enabling our customers to adopt the cloud quickly and easily and are further executing upon our System Design Enablement vision, which enables our customers to be more productive and get to market faster.”

Cadence launches Liberate Trio Characterization Suite

Cadence Design Systems announced the Cadence Liberate Trio Characterization Suite, the industry’s first unified library characterisation tool that runs both statistical and nominal characterisation in parallel and provides complete validation of standard cell libraries.

Employing advanced machine learning techniques, this tool uses smart interpolation to help determine the critical corners that need to be characterised.

By making characterisation processes thoroughly distributed and massively parallel, it has been fully optimised for running on cloud-based servers.

In addition, the Liberate Trio suite offers up to 3X performance increase by running corners in parallel and natively running statistical and nominal characterisation together.

“Characterisation is an extremely time-consuming activity with increasing corners, larger libraries, and new data formats,” said Ron Moore, vice president of business planning, Physical Design Group, Arm. “By using Arm’s Artisan Physical IP, we validated Cadence’s Liberate Trio Characterization Suite and saw a notable improvement in turnaround time using the same number of CPUs. This is an important step in continuing to deliver high-performance libraries to our mutual customers.”

The Liberate Trio Characterization Suite is part of the Cadence Cloud portfolio.

Machine Learning Helps Predict Critical Corners The machine learning algorithms in the Liberate Trio suite help guide the designer, predicting critical corners and helping designers decide what corners need to be characterised.

The tool uses smart interpolation, not just linear interpolation, to ensure accuracy.

“The creation of accurate timing, power and noise models for advanced-node libraries is becoming increasingly complex,” said Vinod Kariat, corporate vice president of research and development at Cadence. “The Liberate Trio Characterization Suite simplifies library characterisation by enabling characterisation across multiple corners and natively integrating nominal and variation in the same run. This significantly improves turnaround time and ease of use.”

Designers today have an increasing need for high-throughput characterisation and fast, accurate re-characterization of custom corners.

Cadence created a unified graphical user interface (GUI) cockpit that lets designers use a single script to efficiently launch and monitor characterisation. This addresses the challenge of maintaining consistency of data across the large number of process, voltage and temperature (PVT) corners. It also helps designers properly mine all the data that is collected.

Optimised for cloud-based server farms

Addressing the parallel nature of library characterisation over hundreds of cells, characterisation uses multiple CPUs to improve throughput.

Now, Cadence has optimised the Liberate Trio suite to be fully cloud ready, whether employed in a public or company private cloud, and scalable to over a thousand CPUs.

Characterisation of a library containing over 1000 cells that would normally take weeks now can be turned around in days.

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