EDA in the Cloud Will be Key to Rapid Innovative SoC Design

By Mahesh Turaga, Cadence Design Systems
EETimes (August 22, 2021)

Simultaneous mega-trends are shaping multiple industries from aerospace and defense, automotive and high-tech to healthcare and others. These include 5G, autonomous vehicles, industrial internet of things (IIoT), electrification, hyperscale computing and artificial intelligence / machine learning (AI/ML). Add cloud to the mix, and we have another generational disruption that has driven business over the past decade and been further accelerated by our current global situation, changing the way we work, live, communicate and entertain. Cloud opportunities go far beyond flexible ubiquitous access.

In the preceding decade, the move towards cloud computing occurred primarily in sectors like retail and finance, with the advent of leading cloud vendors such as Amazon Web Services (AWS), Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and others accelerating the trend. In the electronic design automation (EDA) space, until recently, traditional concerns about security, protecting intellectual property (IP) and data outweighed the significant advantages offered by computing in the cloud — such as flexibility, scalability and productivity.

That is now changing, and the cloud-enabled value of each of those industries is driving the need for intelligent systems. We now see that the only way such systems can be created is by using cloud-enabled computing tools and methods. It is the “systems” that are driving the need for massively parallel computing with close-to-linear performance growth and virtually unlimited scalability while maintaining the highest level of accuracy. Those results are possible only in the cloud. With leading foundries in the space adopting cloud and acknowledging the security of cloud infrastructure by having their process design kits (PDKs) in the cloud, security concerns have by and large diminished.

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