EDA cloud solution allows chip design to enter the highway

Introduction: With the leap of chip technology, EDA needs more and more computing power to process massive data up to PB level. The traditional computing power delivery model has been unable to keep up with the rapidly developing chip design industry. Cloud's rapid delivery and powerful ecosystem provide rich capabilities, scalability and flexibility, making it the best choice for the industry.

In recent years, with the continuous penetration of cloud in all walks of life and the arrival of the era of Industry 4.0, 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. Electronic design automation (EDA) has been developed for nearly 60 years, from the manual completion of integrated circuit design and wiring to the use of computer-aided design software to complete the functional design, synthesis, verification, and physical design of VLSI chips. , The emergence of EDA greatly shortens the chip design cycle and improves the success rate.

With the leap of chip technology, the data processed has reached the petabyte level, and EDA needs more and more computing power. The traditional computing power delivery model 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 product tape-out time rhythm is tight, and on the other hand, the accuracy of IT procurement budget is low, and the procurement cycle is long, which cannot match the R&D rhythm.

At present, the chip design industry generally has the following four challenges in IT:
◾ Time: EDA verification requires a lot of time. Insufficient resources will lead to the failure of verification work to converge, and the procurement cycle of hardware equipment is long. Deployment and construction take a lot of time, which slows down the speed of product launch;
◾ Cost: The task has obvious peak characteristics, the long-term holding of a large number of hardware costs is high, and it is difficult to calculate the project cost and the cost of IT resource occupation cost analysis;
◾ Security: The architecture design is mainly stored in local documents, which is prone to leakage, the data delivery is complex and the volume is huge, there are many authorization and audit links, and there are loopholes in management and control;
◾ Collaboration: Multi-regional office work collaboration, on the one hand, it is difficult for the IT department to quickly provide a unified R&D desktop environment, and on the other hand, data security also faces new challenges.

According to the characteristics and needs of EDA business, Alibaba Cloud has launched a complete EDA cloud solution to help chip design companies improve EDA operation efficiency, accelerate product launch, reduce IT investment pressure, and reduce IT operation and maintenance difficulty.

In this solution, Alibaba Cloud's complete security products realize 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 various forms of hybrid cloud solutions. Maintenance management and control services save O&M and resource costs. Wuying can help semiconductor companies build a unified office and R&D environment in multiple places, so that data does not fall into place and behavior can be audited.

Alibaba Cloud EDA Cloud Solution Architecture Diagram

A domestic leading IC design company 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 this customer, which supports auditing of security operations, and users bring their own keys to the cloud, etc., to ensure their data security needs; in terms of computing resources, a new generation of high-frequency, The large-memory bare metal server ensures that the cloud server can exert the ultimate computing performance through exclusive physical machine resources and virtualized offloading; the elastic high-performance computing platform E-HPC not only saves the customer's operation and maintenance investment through automatic deployment and cluster management capabilities , and also allows customers to maintain the same usage habits as the original in terms of job scheduler, scheduling strategy, etc., with a smooth connection.

In the "Alibaba Cloud EDA Cloud Solution" program on Alibaba Cloud's official website, three experts from Alibaba Cloud will show you how Alibaba Cloud helps chip design enter the "Cloud Highway". Welcome to watch.