A History of Cadence in the Cloud

5 May 2022 • 7 minute read

Cadence Cloud started before there even was a cloud. We just didn't call it Cadence Cloud. Back in the early 2000s, when I was on my first tour of duty at Cadence, we created something that we called Virtual CAD, or VCAD for short. The idea was that companies could outsource their CAD group to Cadence, and we would maintain the tools and the flows for the design company. It didn't really work since the networks of that era were just not up to it. It was still the era of 56K dialup, and cable modems were just starting to be introduced. Security was so primitive I don't think it was really on the radar as one of the biggest issues of all.

But over time, those tentative toes in the water changed into what became known as Hosted Design Solutions (HDS). This worked well for small companies, especially companies that were starting out and so had no pre-existing servers and licenses. Those companies never need to buy servers and hire IT people to run them. The design never leaves Cadence's servers until tapeout. I covered a good example of this in my post Léman Micro Devices: Blood Pressure on Your Smartphone. As I said in that post:

The ASIC is a mixed-signal design. It was done with Cadence tools on a Hosted Design Environment supported by the team in Munich. The big win for them was simplicity: no IT people, no servers, no complicated license mixing.

100 However, HDS didn't work for big companies since they have tens or hundreds of thousands of servers, more than we had. There were a couple of problems with Hosted Design Solutions. I think that the biggest was that you couldn't ramp the capacity quickly. To ramp up, Cadence would have to purchase more servers and find space in its datacenter for them. EDA is especially peaky in its need for compute power as a design moves through its life cycle. Even before EDA parallelized a lot of the tools, many stages of a design could make use of huge numbers of servers had they been available: running tens of thousands of simulation jobs which are all independent, for example.

Mark Benioff had just founded Salesforce.com (in 1999), but nobody had yet come up with the term "cloud" or "SaaS" (software as a service). I think of Salesforce as the first SaaS company. When they started, they had a sort of logo saying "no software," which really meant no software that you had to purchase, install, and run on your own computers, everything ran on Salesforces' servers, and you paid per user, not a big perpetual license like most B2B transactions at the time.

AWS had started in 2006 offering, what is now called IaaS, Infrastructure as a service. The same year at a conference, Google's CEO Eric Schmidt said that Google was "in a cloud somewhere" and the name and the concept became common.

In the late 2010s, Cadence decided that it made sense to migrate HDS to the cloud so that Cadence didn't need to run all the servers, and so it would be easier to ramp the amount of compute up and down to respond to customers' needs. We had about 100 customers on HDS at that point. We worked with a few lead customers to wring out the issues. The ones that are public are Arm, CNEX Labs, and DNA Electronics.

Cadence Cloud

At DAC in 2018, we announced Cadence Cloud. There were three approaches. A customer could maintain their cloud design environment themselves, and Cadence provided cloud-ready software and license servers. We called this Cloud Passport. Alternatively, customers could opt for what we called Cloud-Hosted Design Solution. This was the analogy of HDS, where Cadence basically provided a turnkey solution. The Palladium Cloud gave customers access to shared Palladium boxes.

CloudBurst

Then, in 2019, we announced CloudBurst Platform which was a full cloud environment that helped our customers with both full-flow and peak capacity needs. This also provided a way for companies who had their own datacenters, and allowed them to expand the resources available by "bursting to the cloud," thus enabling them to maintain a hybrid environment for their needs. Cloudburst platform which is a fully managed service from Cadence, with its modern web-based interface is completely set up in the cloud including Cadence products, license server, storage and security components and is available on AWS and Azure. Cloudburst comes in two flavors – FsaaS and PSaaS. In the Full SaaS model, Cadence manages end-to-end experience for the customer. All they have to do is to sign up, and start getting productive from day one without any complexity of installations or downloads. In the PSaaS model, where the customer already has an existing AWS/Azure setup, we work with the customers to leverage their existing environment to set up CloudBurst Platform.

In my blog at the time we announced it, I pointed out some of the advantages:

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

Hybrid Tools

In 2021 we announced the first two hybrid tools, Virtuoso ADE Cloud and Clarity 3D Solver Cloud. So what is a hybrid tool? I explained in my blog post at the time:

A lot of companies have on-premises (on-prem in the jargon) data centers. Some of these are very large, with literally hundreds of thousands of cores. However, in a large company with a number of designs going on simultaneously, even a large data center like that is often not enough for peak loads. Verification, in particular, is never done, so that there is always a backlog of verification jobs that can soak up any amount of capacity. Running one of the most scalable Cadence tools, like the Clarity 3D Solver, can take advantage of literally hundreds of cores but it can take a lot of waiting for a hundred cores to be available simultaneously on-prem. Wouldn't it be nice if you could just click on a menu item in the Clarity 3D Solver, and instead of waiting for those hundred cores to become available, just run the system analysis in the cloud?

Well, as of today, you can do just that.

So basically, you run the hub of the tool on your own server, but the analysis engines that do the work are seamlessly run in the cloud.

Also, in 2021, Cadence acquired NUMECA and its Omnis CFD solution (now Cadence Fidelity CFD Software), including a SaaS offering that enables scalable compute in the cloud for large-scale computational fluid dynamics simulations.

Breakfast Bytes in the Cloud

I have written a lot about Cadence Cloud:

Cadence Cloud Today

We have simplified the product offering with Cloud Hosted Design Solution being merged under the CloudBurst line since they were confusingly similar, both completely managed by Cadence in a turnkey manner.

In summary, Cadence Cloud Portfolio offers our customers the flexibility of a range of different use models, both Cadence-managed as well as customer-managed.

How is it working? Over 250+ customers have adopted Cadence Cloud solutions across Core EDA, Palladium hardware and CFD portfolio. A significant number of these customers successfully completed tape-outs in Cadence Cloud.

Learn More

See the Cadence Cloud Portfolio product page.

Or read the Cadence Cloud brochure.

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