Alibaba Cloud EDA Cloud Solution Brings Chip Design onto the Expressway

Introduction: With the leap of chip technology, EDA needs more and more computing power to process massive data up to petabytes. The traditional computing power delivery model has been unable to keep up with the rapidly developing chip design industry. The rapid delivery of cloud and strong ecology provide rich capabilities, scalability and flexibility, and become the best choice for the industry.

In recent years, with the continuous penetration of cloud in all walks of life and the arrival of Industry 4.0 era, the combination of chip design industry and cloud computing is also deepening.

The semiconductor industry covers a series of links such as design, manufacturing and packaging, among which chip design is a high-risk business. The development of electronic design automation (EDA) has been nearly 60 years, from the manual completion of integrated circuit design, wiring and other work to the use of computer-aided design software to complete the functional design, synthesis, verification, physical design and other work of VLSI chips. The emergence of EDA has greatly shortened the chip design cycle and improved the success rate.

With the leap of chip technology, the data processed has reached the PB level, and EDA needs more and more computing power. The traditional computing power delivery mode has been unable to keep up with the rapidly developing chip design industry. There is a huge contradiction between the tight time to market pressure and the long cycle and high investment of IT construction: on the one hand, the time rhythm of product streaming is tight, on the other hand, the accuracy of IT procurement budget is low, and the procurement cycle is long, which cannot match the pace of research and development.

At present, the chip design industry generally faces the following four challenges in IT:

◾ Time: EDA verification takes a lot of time. Insufficient resources will lead to the inability to converge the verification work, and the procurement cycle of hardware equipment is long. Deployment and construction will take a lot of time, which will slow down the speed of product launch;

◾ Cost: The task has obvious wave crest characteristics, and the cost of holding a large number of hardware for a long time is high. It is difficult to calculate the project cost and analyze the cost of IT resource occupation;

◾ Security: the architecture design is mainly saved by local documents, which is easy to leak, the data delivery is complex and huge, there are many authorization review links, and there are loopholes in management and control;

◾ Collaboration: Multi regional office work collaboration. On the one hand, IT departments are difficult to quickly provide a unified R&D desktop environment; on the other hand, data security is also facing new challenges.

Alibaba Cloud has launched a complete EDA cloud solution based on EDA business characteristics and requirements to help chip design enterprises improve EDA operation efficiency and speed up product launch; Reduce IT investment pressure and IT operation and maintenance difficulty.

In this solution, Alibaba Cloud's complete security products enable comprehensive security protection and full link data security from the network layer to business data. The high concurrency, high performance and good scalability of cloud storage greatly shorten the running time of EDA workflow jobs. The leading high-performance computing product EHPC has built a robust supercomputing cluster, which is compatible with various mainstream schedulers and domain control solutions in the industry, and supports the construction of hybrid cloud solutions in various forms; The platform can flexibly scale computing power according to task needs, and the automatic operation and maintenance management and control service saves operation and maintenance and resource costs. Wuying can help semiconductor enterprises build a unified office and R&D environment in multiple places, so that data does not land and behavior can be audited.

A leading domestic IC design enterprise once faced problems such as insufficient computing power, lack of flexibility, long delivery cycle, heavy operation and maintenance workload, and lack of effective control. Alibaba Cloud has designed a data encryption scheme for the customer, which supports security operation audit, and the user's own key to the cloud, ensuring its data security requirements; In terms of computing resources, a new generation of high dominant frequency, large memory bare metal servers is recommended. Through exclusive physical machine resources and virtual offloading, ECS can play its utmost computing power; The elastic high-performance computing platform E-HPC not only saves customers' operation and maintenance investment through automatic deployment and cluster management capabilities, but also enables customers to maintain the same usage habits and smooth connection in job scheduler, scheduling strategy and other aspects.

On September 20, 2022, in the program "Alibaba Cloud EDA Cloud Solutions" on Alibaba Cloud's official website, three experts from Alibaba Cloud will show you how Alibaba Cloud helps chip design drive into the "cloud highway". Welcome to watch.