Synopsys Partners With Microsoft to Take EDA to the Cloud

Synopsys是合作的Microsoftto help more semiconductor companies move into the cloud.

星期一的硅谷公司推出了一种新的“软件作为服务”，为其芯片设计工具提供了在微软Azure云服务之上运行的。叫Synopsys Cloud，它为芯片工程师提供了从Microsoft的Synopsys和计算资源的广泛访问权限，从Microsoft over over-允许它们仅用于他们所使用的内容。

Synopsys is one of the world’s largest suppliers of electronic-design-automation (EDA) software used in chip design. With Synopsys Cloud, companies can rent out the software tools from Synopsys by the hour instead of buying software licenses and running the programs on-site.

Rani Borkar, who leads hardware systems and infrastructure for Microsoft’s Azure business, said the service “marks a significant milestone for the industry by offering silicon design teams the ability to scale and accelerate their development cycles—transforming chip design the way the cloud transformed computing.”

Clouds on the Horizon

Designing modern chips is a complicated three-dimensional design problem that can take several years. The chips have become so intricate that it is impossible for engineers to design every single detail by themselves. Instead, they use EDA software to automate many of the steps in this process: from arranging components on the floorplan of the processor to verifying its performance and preparing it for final production at a fab.

“Addressing systemic complexity along with interdependent design flows in chip design requires more compute and EDA resources than ever before,” stated Borkar.

Today, the most advanced computer chips contain billions of transistors that are arranged into millions of logic gates. Simulating a chip ahead of volume production takes a massive amount of computing power; thus, companies tend to lean on colossal in-house data centers largely devoted to running EDA workloads.

But now everyone from top-tier chip makers to startups is moving more of these workloads to the cloud in a bid to boost productivity for increasingly complex chip designs. Arm plans to move the majority of its EDA workloads to Arm-based cloud services at AWS. Last year, NXP Semiconductors said it also shifted most of its EDA workloads to AWS to help it design new chips faster and keep development costs in check.

Renting out resources over the cloud will help stop semiconductor firms from over- or under-spending on their internal data centers. It will also help reduce the risk of not having enough computing resources on hand to simulate increasingly intricate chips designs. By moving EDA workloads to the cloud, companies are trying to give their engineers more time to focus on designing chips and less on managing in-house servers.

Extra Flexibility

For Synopsys, the goal is to give its customers the flexibility to run chip design workloads where they see fit.

Synopsys has partnered with top cloud providers in the U.S., including Alphabet’s Google, Amazon Web Services (AWS), and Microsoft Azure to allow its customers to deploy EDA tools on public cloud services.

它还与GlobalFoundries，三星和台积电等领先的合同芯片代工厂密切合作，以确保其基于云的产品与图书馆和流程设计套件（PDK）合作。

But with the new “software as a service” offering from Synopsys, customers can directly access and pay as they go for compute resources from Azure and preconfigured cloud-based chip design tools from Synopsys.

已经从亚马逊，谷歌，微软或其他公共云计算服务中租用计算资源的客户也可以利用“带上自己的云”方法的Synopsys云。

That gives its customers the ability to dial computing resources up or down in response to their changing chip design and verification needs, instead of investing in upgrades to their data centers long term. That lets them do things such as reduce processing time on verification tasks or save runtime while modeling the performance of a new chip design. Having on-demand infrastructure helps curb costs and time-to-market.

“随着更多的设计流量合并AI，需要更多资源，几乎无限制的计算和EDA访问我们提供的是新的半导体创新水平的基础，同时为未来需求提供灵活，安全的芯片开发环境，”添加了SassineSynopsys的首席运营官Ghazi。

Microsoft表示，Synopsys Cloud由AMD的最新EPYC处理器提供支持，具有3D V-Cache技术。

公司可以立即注册Synopsys Cloud。