Solutions for an Era of "Hyperlatives"

We use the prefix "hyper" quite a bit these days. "Hyperconnectivity," "hyperscale computing," "hyperscalers," and "hyperconverged infrastructure" are just some of the related terms flying around. And we are well beyond the initial hype!

You are reading the inaugural blog for the new solutions channel in the Cadence blogosphere. We will look at the electronics design chain, and the role Cadence plays with its computational software know-how for intelligent system design from the perspective of the vertical industries Cadence is serving. We will look at how combining individual products for semiconductor IP, verification, digital and custom analog implementation, and system design and analysis holistically solves customer challenges. And we will look at the drivers of design requirements that eventually stem from end consumers. For instance, consumers like you and me need to have our devices on all the time, which drives low power and energy consumption requirements.

Consequently, we at Cadence have technology solutions that combine our different business areas. Low power spans across IP, verification, and digital implementation for activity analysis and extends to system analysis for thermal aspects. 3D-IC chip integration requires IP blocks to connect chiplets, high-capacity verification, digital and analog implementation, and extends to thermal and electromagnetic system analysis. You get my drift.

Shifting the angle to the consumers like you and me, the common them these days is "hyperconnectivity." What do we mean by that?

The hyperconnectivity and hyperscale computing landscape from sensors to the data center

Hyperconnectivity is all about data: its creation, transmission, computing, and storage. Hyperscale computing processes vast amounts of data in hyperscale data centers. Data volumes are growing at a never-before-seen scale. Hyperconnectivity allows significantly more data to be collected, transported, and analyzed in cloud, network, and mobile devices. The combination of hyperscale computing and hyperconnectivity results in actionable insights that substantially improve device performance and user experiences. Hyperscale data centers and a range of edges process insights so that smart-converged, more powerful user devices predict what we may need by learning our behaviors more accurately. We characterize edges by distance from the cloud data center as far, middle, and near edges. All this leads to hyperconnected, always-available data informing our online and physical lives.

First, let's define the different "hyper" terms from what I have seen at customers and in the industry in general:

• "Hyperscalers" are system companies building their own data centers and these days often develop custom chips. Who would have thought a couple of years ago that social media companies and cloud providers would keynote at our CadenceLIVE user conference about their own chip designs? Some analysts separate different tiers, with tier 1 being the companies that drive cloud services and social media. By some estimates, their data centers each have at least 50,000 servers. In 2017 alone, it was estimated that they had a collective data center capital expenditure of $50 billion, and the numbers have grown significantly since then. The second tier includes cloud providers, software as a service (SaaS) providers, and extends to platforms in mobility, payment processing, and commerce such as Uber, PayPal, and eBay.
• "Hyperconnectivity" is the umbrella term describing our connected world. Cadence has been using it for our recent consumer survey "Hyperconnectivity and You: A Roadmap for the Consumer Experience." The "Institute for the Future" has published a report, "The Hyperconnected World of 2030–2040"—a fascinating read.
• "Hyperconvergence" is often applied to infrastructure and describes the convergence of memory, storage, networking, and computing in the data center. It usually is used in storage to differentiate between hyperconverged, disaggregated, and centralized architectures.
• "Hyperautomation," per Gartner, is a "business-driven, disciplined approach that organizations use to rapidly identify, vet, and automate as many business and IT processes as possible. Hyperautomation involves the orchestrated use of multiple technologies, tools or platforms." Guess what? It is all around IT and uses hyperscale computing and hyperscale data centers, of course.

To enable all these "hyperlatives," developers need solutions that combine technologies using Cadence's extensive computational software know-how. We will talk about them all in this blog. Stay tuned!