Today Cadence announced Cadence Cloud. This is the beginning of a major change in how EDA capabilities are delivered. I doubt that all EDA will move into the cloud—there will certainly be some customers who want to keep some of their computation in their own datacenters ("on-prem" is the buzzword, short for on premises). Further, the change won't happen overnight in any case. But this is a major shift that I think will play out over the next few years. Cadence Cloud portfolio consists of: Cadence Cloud Passport Cloud-Hosted Design Solution Palladium Cloud Cadence Cloud Passport This solution is intended for companies, presumably larger ones, that have the IT resources to maintain their own cloud environment on Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, or Google Cloud. This is a mixture of cloud-ready tools, along with a cloud-aware license server. Although there is no reason a smaller company could not use this approach, I think it is much more likely that this will be attractive to larger companies, who have large on-prem server farms, but want to augment that with the cloud, either as a way of handling peak loads (known as "burst to the cloud") or to start migrating more of their environment to the cloud rather than expanding or upgrading their hardware. Cloud-Hosted Design Solution This solution is a managed EDA environment on either Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. The customer doesn't need to worry about the details of setting up the environment. This can either be used to provide additional computing resources for peak needs or can be used to provide a complete environment. Normally, setting up a cloud-hosted design solution requires a discussion of what tool environment is needed, and then it has to be created. However, there is also express access for some specific turnkey tool environments, where Cadence has already set everything up and the design group can start using the solution almost instantly. One such solution, also announced today, is Liberate Trio. Watch for a future post giving more details about this. Palladium Cloud This is a specific solution providing access to Palladium Z1 for emulation and software development. It can be used along with the other Cadence Cloud solutions, but just due to the nature of the hardware it is a separate solution hosted in a Cadence-managed facility. Obviously, you can't run Palladium on generic cloud servers. The economics of owning your own Palladium emulator(s) work well if a company has a large, consistent need for emulation and so they can keep one or more Palladium Z1 boxes busy 24/7. But it is no secret that emulation hardware is not cheap, and a company or design group that needs emulation for just a few months cannot really justify the investment. But, increasingly, emulation is an essential part of chip design to run the emulated system with a software load to make sure that the operating system can boot, for example. Or it is required to provide a substrate for software development to get started before the chip design is complete. An additional consideration is that Palladium has demanding installation requirements: high electrical power, water cooling (or extensive air cooling), computer room with raised floor, and so on. For some users, they simply don't have anywhere suitable already, so somewhere special would need to be constructed, which is additional expense and delay. I will write a future post focused only on Palladium Cloud. Cloud Changes Everything The image above shows the major changes that cloud brings versus on-prem datacenters. These changes lead to a few very desirable attributes that the cloud can deliver. The first attribute is productivity. With a fixed-size server farm, there is almost always a mismatch between the servers available and the engineers. If there are too few servers, then engineers can be idle. If there are too many servers...ok, this never happens. In fact, there are rarely enough servers, partially because there is always more verification that could be done. However, even when there is the budget for more servers, it takes time to acquire them, install them, and get them ready for engineers to be able to use, leading to loss of productivity as engineers wait for the additional capability to come online. The second attribute is flexibility. You can choose to manage your own cloud environment, or you can choose to have Cadence manage it for you, but still retain your own choice of cloud vendor. If in the future, you revisit those decisions, then you can do that too. The third attribute is scalability. Whether you need 10, 100, or thousands of servers, then you can have them. As more Cadence tools are enhanced to take advantage of very large numbers of servers, then this will become more important. At the CEO Panel organized by the ESD Alliance a couple of months ago, Simon Segars, the CEO of Arm, said : I can't wait for EDA in the cloud. I own 2 datacenters and it is a huge pain to forecast who is using them when. I want to be able to have 3 projects all doing simulation at the same time, and if a fourth comes along, no problem. Another aspect of scalability of the cloud is that the number of servers can go down. If physical verification needs hundreds of servers, once the job completes, the servers can be returned and do not sit idle while the depreciation clock keeps running. The fourth attribute is security. Historically, one of the big barriers to the use of the cloud has been the perception (and back in the past, probably the reality) that cloud solutions were not secure. But now the security capabilities of the cloud providers are superior to the security of on-prem datacenters. That includes physical security (armed guards etc) as well as state-of-the-art data security. In addition, Cadence doesn't take any of this on faith and does their own security audits. Crucially, foundries and IP vendors ara also satisfied with cloud security, and so what would otherwise be missing pieces of the puzzle are also available in the cloud. Experience There are two areas where Cadence already has extensive cloud experience. The first is that some tools, such as Pegasus physical verification, Xcelium simulation, and Voltus IR analysis have always been cloud-ready since their introduction. However, Cadence has been working with many customers on all three of the offerings (Cloud Passport, Cloud-hosted, Palladium Cloud) for the last year or more. For example, Idex is a Norway-based public company delivering fingerprint sensors. They were struggling with growth and having trouble hiring experienced IT and CAD engineers and maintaining their environment. Worse, fingerprint sensors are a hot area right now and they didn't want to miss the market. So they augmented their existing environment and have been using a Cadence Cloud-Hosted design solution, primarily an analog/mixed-signal flow hosted on Amazon AWS. As their design manager said: I found myself up and running and worrying no more about systems/tools. An example of a customer using Palladium Cloud was an automotive ADAS startup working on a 64-million-gate design. This is below the threshold at which it makes any economic sense to purchase a Palladium emulator of their own. Plus they would only need the unit for about 8 months. Instead, they successfully used Palladium Cloud, with virtual JTAG. Cloudy Fridays Fridays this summer will be cloudy, and I will write posts about various aspects of Cadence Cloud. In fact, although you probably didn't notice, I have been doing that for the last few weeks. I started looking at EDA business models in Why Did EDA Have a Hardware Business Model? , and then looked at how outdated typical EDA infrastructure has become in The Design Infrastructure Alley , and finally, last Friday, about how early attempts at delivering EDA in something close to what we now call the cloud all failed, in Remember Virtual CAD? DesignSphere Access? What an ASP Was? All of these posts were really a preamble to this announcement: EDA's business model is changing again, the infrastructure is modernizing, and the time for EDA in the cloud was not 15 years ago, but is now. Summary Cadence Cloud is the first EDA product offering in the cloud. This consists of Cloud Passport, for companies that simply want to be able to extend their on prem datacenters into the cloud, but don't require Cadence to do more than provide cloud-ready tools and license server. Then there is Cloud-Hosted Design Solution where Cadence manages the environment and delivers flexible EDA capability that can expand and contract as computational needs grow and shrink, either in the short term, for peak needs like tapeout, or in the longer term as the company grows, or as one design is superseded by the next larger design. Finallly, there is Palladium Cloud, giving design teams access to emulation capability without having the high up-front cost, complex installation, and ongoing maintenance of their own Palladium Z1 box(es). Cadence Cloud has the main advantages of cloud in general: resources can be added in minutes, not weeks, without any capital demands since everything is an operational expense. For more details, see the Cadence Cloud page . 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