Cadence OnCloud SaaS and e-Commerce Platform, the Next Step of Cadence's Cloud Journey

Today at CadenceLIVE Silicon Valley, Anirudh Devgan, Cadence's CEO, announced the OnCloud SaaS and e-Commerce Platform (or Cadence OnCloud to its friends) during his keynote.

I recently wrote about the long history of Cadence Cloud in my post A History of Cadence in the Cloud. That started in the early 2000s with Virtual CAD in the era of 56K dial-up modems. That marginally successful approach morphed into Hosted Design Environments, which was hosted in Cadence data centers since cloud data centers did not exist. Once they did, it made no sense for Cadence to host its own and Cadence Cloud was announced back in 2018, with further developments in the intervening years. More recently, we announced the CloudBurst platform (and a portfolio of hybrid tools), simplifying the process of getting going in the cloud.

Today is the next development.

Cadence OnCloud

Cadence OnCloud is a SaaS and eCommerce Platform delivering consumption-based access for PCB design, system analysis, and computational fluid dynamics (CFD). It is powered by Amazon Web Services (AWS). The product is intended for companies adopting a “cloud-first” approach for design and analysis solutions that can be accessed anywhere from any device. The Cadence OnCloud SaaS platform includes the industry’s first e-commerce offering that enables instant access for customers to purchase, launch, and use products in a matter of minutes. It delivers significant productivity, time-to-market, and scalability benefits by harnessing the power of cloud scalability. The platform eliminates traditional software purchasing overhead and allows instant access in the form of specialized apps that are pre-configured as packages to address designer type and functional needs. The offering is targeted at those with limited infrastructure or resources that require advanced design and system analysis solutions.

Cadence has had an off-Broadway opening of Cadence OnCloud since the beginning of the year, so as a result there are already thousands of users. Today it's Cadence OnCloud's opening night.

Building upon its cloud-based leadership with the Cadence CloudBurst SaaS platform that has been widely adopted by 260+ customers in EDA, Cadence has expanded its technology offerings with new product packages by introducing the first storefront for those needing advanced design and system analysis solutions instantaneously. Cadence OnCloud has many significant advances and capabilities that go beyond traditional enterprise-wide licensing models. Most notably, Cadence OnCloud eliminates the need for costly on-premises compute and server resources that require high levels of maintenance and operational overhead and typically consume high levels of power. The platform also allows users to subscribe to their preferred consumption-based usage models based on design needs and projected project durations, delivering the flexibility required to address increased workloads and schedule pressures. With Cadence OnCloud, users will now have the ability to scale and adjust valuable worldwide resources for growing businesses and design project workloads. Together with AWS, on which Cadence OnCloud is built, Cadence extends its cloud leadership with scale to enable tens of thousands of users on the SaaS platform, thus leveraging cloud as key enabler of its chips-to-systems strategy for systems innovation

There are a variety of support options for Cadence OnCloud, ranging from self-help to Cadence online support, and also a variety of SaaS delivery options from free trials to subscriptions. In fact, Cadence OnCloud doesn't just address support issues, it addresses a business issue faced by almost all business-to-business companies, namely that using direct sales only the largest companies can be addressed by a company like Cadence. Smaller customers require a self-service model, and that is what Cadence OnCloud's SaaS model delivers. As I said above, it "eliminates the traditional software purchasing overhead", which is pretty much the same thing.

The above diagram shows how base technologies that users of Cadence tools have trusted for a long time are grouped into easy-to-understand offerings.

The base technologies are:

• Orcad Pro and PSpice for PCB design
• Allegro Venture, and PSpice for advanced PCB design
• Clarity, Sigrity, and Celsius for electrical analysis and thermal analysis
• Fidelity for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)

These are grouped into 4 new offerings available in Cadence OnCloud:

• Mainstream PCB Design: Provides PCB design software that is easy to use from start to finish with Cadence OrCAD® PCB design technologies.
• Advanced PCB Design: Provides comprehensive schematic design and layout capabilities with the in-design analysis verification tools in Cadence Allegro® technologies.
• Multiphysics Analysis: Provides robust multiphysics computational software for electromagnetics, thermal, power and signal integrity, using the Cadence Clarity, Sigrity, and Celsius solvers.
• Mainstream and Advanced CFD: Provides all-in-one computational fluid dynamics (CFD) end-to-end workflows—from meshing all types of flow domains to solving multiphysics flow problems to advanced flow analysis post-processing—using Cadence Fidelityn CFD Software.

Video

This video shows the process of a user starting from scratch and getting going using Cadence OnCloud.

AWS, Annapurna, and the Cloud

One company that has been using the EDA in the cloud for some time is Annapurna Labs. This is not surprising if you know that it is owned by AWS. Annapurna designed the Graviton3 Arm-based server processor (and the two prior versions). So Annapurna uses its own products in the cloud to design its next-generation products. I have written about Annapurna before in my post Climbing Annapurna to the Clouds and other posts linked from there.

Ian Collie is GM HPC and Batch Computing at  AWS. His view is that:

AWS has worked closely with Cadence during the development of the Cadence OnCloud SaaS and e-commerce platform, which provides our mutual customers near-instant access to advanced system analysis and design solutions with the flexibility, performance and accessibility of AWS Cloud.“We are committed to working with Cadence to help deliver a secure, efficient and high-performing environment for Cadence OnCloud customers.

Learn More

See the Cadence OnCloud page.

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