I think if you were starting a new semiconductor company, you would go straight for a cloud-based solution and not bother with the cost and complexity of building up your own datacenter, and the black-belt IT department needed to install and maintain it. Existing semiconductor companies, however, already have a lot of their own on-premises (on-prem) datacenters which are their first choice as a compute resource since they are already on the books as a depreciating asset. However, during peak periods such as tapeout at the end of a design or library characterization at the start, the on-prem resources may be insufficient. A hybrid approach is very attractive. This would use the datacenter when possible and then "burst to the cloud" when those resources are exhausted.

CloudBurst Hybrid Platform

Today, Cadence announced the CloudBurst platform for hybrid cloud environments. A hybrid cloud environment is a computing environment with on-prem datacenters coupled with easy access to pre-installed Cadence tools in a cloud environment running on Amazon AWS or Microsoft Azure. This approach makes maximal use of existing datacenters, but also adds effectively unlimited compute capacity when needed.

The CloudBurst platform lets companies get all the benefits of Cadence Cloud with very fast deployment compared to internally-provided cloud solutions. It offers customers a production-proven, Cadence-managed environment for compute-intensive EDA workloads with no tool installation or cloud set-up required so that engineers can focus on their engineering task and not have to worry about administering the compute infrastructure.

Some specific features of CloudBurst that get users up and running quickly are:

• CloudBurst includes unique file-transfer technology that significantly accelerates the transfer speed of the massive file sizes created required by today’s complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs
• CloudBurst complements existing on-premises datacenter investments and enables CAD and IT teams to easily address peak needs without prior cloud expertise
• CloudBurst supports a range of cloud-based tools including functional verification, circuit simulation, library characterization, and signoff tools, which benefit from cloud-scale compute
• Security: all Cadence-managed cloud solutions have strong security, and meet the requirements of third-party IP providers and foundries
• Customers can use existing ordering and licensing systems, eliminating sometimes lengthy legal and administrative hassles.
• Cadence offers two payment models to cover the unpredictable infrastructure fees

Cadence Cloud Portfolio

CloudBurst complements the broader Cadence Cloud portfolio, which consists of:

• Cloud Passport model: customer-managed design environment.
• Cloud-Hosted Design Solution: turnkey Cadence-managed design environment.
• New, the CloudBurst hybrid cloud environment.
• Palladium Cloud: providing access to Cadence-hosted Palladium Z1 emulation capacity.

500M+ Instance Signoff

One of the early customers for CloudBurst was Barefoot Networks, who used it to complete timing signoff with Tempus on a huge design. Dan Lenoski, the chief development officer, tells the story:

We successfully ran more than 500 million instances flat using the fully distributed Cadence Tempus Timing Signoff Solution on the CloudBurst platform via AWS to complete the tapeout of our latest 7nm networking chip. This would have been impossible to achieve in the required timeframe if we hadn’t deployed the Cadence hybrid cloud solution, which offered quick and easy access to the massive compute power we needed and a 10X productivity improvement over an on-premises static timing analysis approach for final signoff.

You can hear more details at CDNLive later this week in session CLO203: STA Signoff of 500M+ 7nm ASIC with Tempus Timing Signoff Solution where Barefoot's static timing expert Karthik Kannan will talk about timing signoff of the Tofino 2 chip. Here's a little more detail from his abstract:

Complete functional mode STA signoff of the 500M+ leaf cell instance Tofino 2 switch ASIC utilized a Cadence-managed public cloud environment that provided secure compute capacity allowing Barefoot to quickly scale to 1000+ CPUs, when necessary, and fully leveraged the highly-parallelized Tempus architecture for faster turnaround time. Our experience in using Tempus and its advanced features for STA signoff, such as DSTA (Distributed STA) on the entire design, SOCV (Statistical On-Chip Variation) analysis, to name a few, are presented. We will also go over some of the key challenges we encountered and overcame with guidance and support from Cadence.

More Information

For more information, see the CloudBurst page.

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