Cadence Delivers the First Broad Cloud Portfolio for the Development of Electronic Systems and Semiconductors

SAN FRANCISCO—DESIGN AUTOMATION CONFERENCE, 25 Jun 2018 -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NASDAQ: CDNS) today 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.

The announcement was made at the 55^th annual Design Automation Conference (DAC) being held in San Francisco at Moscone Center West, June 25-28, 2018. Cadence is located in booth 1308 in the main exhibit hall and booth 1245 in the Design Infrastructure Alley. For more information on the new Cadence Cloud portfolio, please visit www.cadence.com/go/cadencecloud.

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 optimize 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 authorized 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 signoff, extraction, power integrity and library characterization (see related news at www.cadence.com/go/liberatetrionews). Additional tools will be available based on customer need.

Cadence-Managed Environments

The Cadence Cloud-Hosted Design Solution, also part of the Cadence Cloud portfolio, provides software tools in a fully-supported, managed and EDA-optimized design environment built on AWS or Microsoft Azure that has been customized 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 characterization.

Start-ups and small companies can benefit from a customized 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 datacenters 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-optimized 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 customized 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.”

Endorsements

“Arm is seeing strong demand in the industry for cloud services that alleviate peak resource needs. One way Arm is addressing this demand is by working with Cadence to provide our mutual customers with a cloud-based library characterization capability faster and more efficiently, enabling them to realize improved cost and time-to-market benefits.”
- Ron Moore, vice president of business planning, Physical Design Group, Arm

“We started using Cadence HDS on-premise with great success a few years ago because we needed full infrastructure and CAD and IT staff support. Now as our company has grown, we have decided to make the move to the Cadence Cloud-Hosted Design Solution deployed on Microsoft Azure in order to improve scalability. As a dynamic start-up, outsourcing to Cadence was critical so that we could remain focused on growing our business through the development and delivery of innovative solid-state storage controller solutions for cloud, hyperscale and enterprise datacenters.”
- Ronnie Huang, CTO and co-founder, CNEX Labs, Inc.

“As the inventor of pioneering genomic analysis technologies for healthcare applications, we design and develop innovative integrated circuits to detect DNA as a simple electrical signal. Our use of semiconductor-based genomic analysis sets us apart from other molecular diagnostics companies by bringing next-generation sequencing (NGS) or multiplexed PCR (DNA amplification) technologies directly to the clinical environment to provide rapid, near-patient actionable information. Through use of the Cadence Cloud-Hosted Design Solution deployed on AWS, we have successfully modernized our IT infrastructure for silicon design. The cloud-based approach enhanced collaboration of our world-class team, and Cadence’s support has allowed a seamless move to this new service delivery model.”
- Simon Morling, vice president product development, DNA Electronics Ltd.

About Cadence

Cadence enables electronic systems and semiconductor companies to create the innovative end products that are transforming the way people live, work and play. Cadence^® software, hardware and semiconductor IP are used by customers to deliver products to market faster. The company’s System Design Enablement strategy helps customers develop differentiated products—from chips to boards to systems—in mobile, consumer, cloud datacenter, automotive, aerospace, IoT, industrial and other market segments. Cadence is listed as one of Fortune Magazine's 100 Best Companies to Work For. Learn more at www.cadence.com.