Last year at DAC, Cadence announced Cadence Cloud (see my post Cadence Cloud from that day for details). Since then we have announced CloudBurst (see my post CloudBurst: The Best of Both Worlds for those details), and various other foundry-based cloud solutions. That means that today the Cadence Cloud offerings look like the diagram below.

There are now four basic ways to use Cadence Cloud:

• Cloud Passport, for customers who want to manage their environments and just need cloud-enabled tools and license managers to do so.
• Cadence Cloud-hosted Design Solutions, which is a turnkey approach where Cadence manages the design environment and the relationship with the cloud vendor.
• CloudBurst, which is a solution for customers who have their own on-premises data centers but also sometimes need incremental resources in the cloud for peak needs such as tapeout. This is known as "bursting to the cloud."
• Palladium Cloud, which gives access to Palladium Z1 emulation for people for whom buying their own Palladium Z1 platform and hosting it in their own data center is not appropriate. This is different from the other solutions in that it is not (mainly) using the servers from cloud suppliers, but rather it is getting access to a farm of emulators in a data center managed by Cadence.

All these solutions work well, provided that you only want access to expertise that Cadence has. In particular, you only want expertise on Cadence tools. But there are some people who want to use other tools too. In principle, the customer company's IT group can maintain an environment with whatever tools are required. But for a customer who wants a more turnkey solution, there are challenges since Cadence employees are not experts on other EDA company's tools, and have no (or very limited) access to them. Also, the customer's IT department might lack expertise on Cadence tools, or simply not have the bandwidth. Independent partners who can help in these situations are required.

Passport Partner Program

Last Monday, Cadence announced the Cloud Passport Partner Program to support customers who need additional help beyond what their own IT department can provide, with qualified partners who are knowledgeable and proficient at deploying Cadence tools in cloud-based design environments.

The inaugural members include commercial partners Rescale, Scala Computing, and Nimbis Services. There are also academic partners CMC Microsystems (in Canada) and EUROPRACTICE (in...surprise...Europe).

The above table shows the challenges to cloud deployment where Passport Partners can assist, ranging from lack of expertise to bring up a secure cloud environment, to simple resource limits, to the multi-vendor cloud environments that I already mentioned above.

The benefits for the customer for working with a Cloud Passport Partner are:

• Proven path to a self-managed cloud environment featuring Cadence tools
• Fast and easy way to adopt the cloud
• Ability to customize the environment to address complex flows
• Opportunity for a multi-cloud solution
• Specialty services available for ITAR, academia, and more

The benefits to the partners (and potential partners) are:

• Access to Cadence tools for development and testing purposes
• Access to Cadence training and support
• Increased channel reach with Cadence worldwide field team
• Collaboration and joint marketing

From the Cadence Cloud point of view, these are Cloud Passport installations, maintained by the customer. But the Passport Partners can assist in ways varying from providing some incremental resources or expertise, all the way up to providing a turnkey multi-vendor design environment.

Results

Some deployments using the initial partners have already been done:

• Nimbis has delivered a cloud-based microelectronics ecosystem to facilitate collaboration across groups associated with the U.S. Air Force Research Laboratory.
• Scala’s cloud enablement expertise, combined with Cadence tools, has made a joint design and manufacturing (JDM) collaboration possible for Zebra Technologies, a major provider of edge devices for retail, medical, and logistical data acquisition.
• Rescale has worked with a customer to reduce capital and operating expenses by 30% over a one-year period in the communications space.

CMC and Notre Dame

At DAC last week, I talked to Owain Jones of CMC Microsystems. They support all the partners of the Cadence Academic Network in Canada, and some in the US, too. They have been working with Cadence for over 25 years. They do more than software, providing what they call "CAD, fab, and lab." They do 25 multi-project wafer (MPW) runs each year, and have labs for characterizing silicon. They have their own private cloud for providing service to academic departments without the expertise or money to maintain their own environment in a public cloud. They have about 50 full-time staff. Their focus is entirely on universities. As I said above, Rescale, Scala, and Nimbis provide services to commercial customers.

I also talked to Matt Morrison at the University of Notre Dame in Indiana. He was previously at the University of Mississippi and talked about his experience creating courses based on Cadence tools at CDNLive in Silicon Valley a couple of years ago, where I first met him.

He is doing a pilot program with CMC, along with Amazon AWS and Cadence. The goal is to implement cloud computing for EDA in the classroom, and see the pros and cons of cloud versus running on a server. He has been in the process of getting that set up and will be using it for courses in fall and spring. So far he has been testing to make sure that all tools that are available through the Cadence Academic Network run smoothly: Virtuoso, Genus, Innovus, Voltus, and so on. He plans a high-level synthesis class in spring so is also focusing on a flow from Stratus through implementation.

He told me that coordinating between all the legal departments on contracts has been one of the biggest time sinks. This is partly because CMC is based in Canada, Notre Dame in US, but there is also involvement from both Cadence and AWS, the cloud provider. Most of this is work that won't need to be repeated for whatever university turns out to be the second to follow this path.

One advantage he's already discovered is that some universities don't give undergraduates VPN access, meaning that they can't work off-campus. But they can access everything in the cloud from anywhere.

To pipe-clean everything, Matt downloaded the zipfiles from Cadence ILS courses, moved them from his personal laptop up into the cloud, and then ran all the GUIs and simulations. Everything so far has gone cleanly. The next step is in the fall, to implement everything with several students in a real class. One thing to discover is how much credit on the cloud side is needed to get through a full VLSI course.

If all goes well, the experience of the pilot program should make it easy (or let's say "straightforward" anyway) to bring up courses at other universities. As Matt put it at the end of our meeting:

One thing we want to do is encourage the growth of EDA tools everywhere so that the cost is not prohibitive to students at institutions that don’t have the same resources.

Matt is very aware of this since, as I mentioned above, his career teaching VLSI design started at Ole Miss and now he's at Notre Dame, so he's gone from one of the poorer universities in the country to one of the richest.

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