Inside Akeana and Cadence’s Secret Sauce for Faster RISC-V Chip Verification

The Nightmare of Chip Testing (And How to Fix It)

Let's be real: designing ambitious new RISC-V chips is cool, but testing them is an absolute nightmare. When you are building crazy complex pipelines and custom instructions, you eventually hit a massive brick wall. Your designs are brilliant, but traditional simulators are too slow to run actual software on them. To catch every glitch before making the physical chip, you need trillions of test cycles. Who has the time to wait around for that while the launch deadline creeps closer?

The crew at Akeana hit this exact roadblock. Instead of crying into their coffee, they teamed up with Cadence Palladium Cloud to speed things up. Here is how they turned a scheduling nightmare into a massive win.

The Backstory and The Big Problem

In just four years, Akeana built a massive tech portfolio. We are talking about everything from tiny edge microcontrollers and smart car brains to data center AI chips. They do way more than basic processor cores; they build the heavy-duty system infrastructure like cache controllers, data highways, and advanced AI engines. But mixing and matching all these parts creates a giant puzzle. Testing individual blocks is easy. Testing how they all interact when running actual operating systems and AI software? That is a different beast. Traditional testing methods could not keep up. Akeana needed a way to test everything at scale without blowing their budget or burning out their engineers.

Enter Cadence Palladium Cloud

Instead of just buying a mountain of expensive new servers, Akeana upgraded their strategy by moving to Cadence Palladium Cloud. This gave them instant access to top-tier hardware acceleration in the cloud, allowing them to subscribe massive emulation computing power exactly when they needed it. No huge upfront hardware costs and no new IT infrastructure to build up. Their engineers just code securely on-site, push the massive workloads to the cloud, and let it rip. Even better, they aligned their emulation models so they could run massive system checks every single night with zero drama.

The Results: Working Like Tech Giants

This partnership turned Akeana into a speed machine, giving them the kind of agile development power usually reserved for trillion-dollar tech giants.

• Supercharged tuning: They managed 10 to 15 performance upgrade iterations per month.
• Two-day turnaround: They cut the time between writing code and getting system feedback down to just two days.
• Running real AI workloads: They ran continuous AI data tests to prove their hardware handles real-world software without breaking a sweat.
• Trillions of cycles: By running 24/7 in the cloud, they ran trillions of test cycles. When customers get their tech, it is already battle-tested.

"Using Cadence Palladium Cloud was critical for Akeana to get to high-quality product readiness in a short time. The platform enabled fast development and debug cycles... and provided a cost-effective way to scale."

Your Turn!

If your engineering team is losing its mind trying to validate massive AI workloads or complex chip architectures, stop waiting on traditional simulators. Reach out to the Cadence Sales Support Team to see how Palladium Cloud can save your timeline.