Industry Expert Blogs

How many transistors can you pack into the space of a handheld device? The number increases by orders of magnitude with each passing decade. Portable music players illustrate the point. In 1979, a transistor radio required roughly 200 transistors. In 1984, the CD player needed around 1,500 transistors. In 1990, an MP3 player needed approximately 10,000 transistors. For the digital audio player of 2015, it was around 1,000,000 transistors. Advances in process technology has enabled these increases, and today multi-die systems, largely driven by advanced AI and 5G applications, are helping to enable another gigantic leap forward. In fact, in 2023, a typical smartphone had over 10 billion transistors! The user advantages are clear. In the case of music, this translates to better fidelity, more space to play, store, and stream your favorite tunes, more features in terms of sharing, playback, interoperability with other devices, and more. But sophistication is not without its design challenges.

The increased need for compute resources is not in practical alignment with the capital expense of on-premise servers or the time it takes to install them. In the face of cost pressures, shrinking market windows, and market demands—better performance and more features—on-premise storage is a burden that many businesses can no longer bear. The need for the elastic scaling of compute resources for IC design in the cloud has arrived.

The first broad-scale SaaS solution to enable you to leverage the cloud for IC design is Synopsys Cloud. Synopsys Cloud combines the availability of advanced compute and storage infrastructure with unlimited access to EDA software licenses on demand. As part of the TSMC Open Innovation Platform® (OIP) Ecosystem, Synopsys recently collaborated with TSMC and Microsoft to conduct a test case for performing design rule checks (DRCs) in the Microsoft Azure cloud on the TSMC N3E process using Synopsys IC Validator™ physical verification, a Synopsys Cloud offering.

The results? DRC in the cloud can help get your next big, complex IC designs to sign off faster – here’s how.

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