Is Cloud Computing Suitable For Chip Design?
Brian Bailey, Semiconductor Engineering
Is semiconductor design being left behind in a cloud-dominated world? Finance, CRM, office applications and many other sectors have made the switch to a cloud-based computing environment, but the EDA industry and its users have hardly started the migration. Are EDA needs and concerns that different from everyone else? We are starting to see announcements from EDA companies, but few cheerleaders are ready to announce that they do design in the cloud.
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The EDA industry is still grappling with pricing for the cloud. “Licensing and pricing for cloud-based tools is very much an evolving topic,” says Tom Anderson, technical marketing consultant for OneSpin Solutions. “A task that might take weeks to run on a small server farm might execute in hours in a massively parallel cloud, but it still costs the vendor the same amount of money to develop and support the tools involved. Users can get higher quality results, reduce infrastructure costs and accommodate peak tool usage while maximizing their verification engineering resources. The business arrangements must reflect this value while being reasonable for both vendors and users.”
