The Synopsys Cloud provides access to the company's cloud-optimised design and verification products, with pre-optimised infrastructure on Microsoft Azure to address higher levels of interdependencies in chip development.
With semiconductor companies increasingly challenged to quickly deliver both complex functionality and energy efficiency chip development in the cloud represents a way forward for an industry grappling with exploding computational demands along with continued time-to-market pressure.
Innovative design houses, large systems companies and small start-ups are migrating workloads to the cloud to take full advantage of the faster time-to-results, enhanced quality-of-results and better cost-of-results that cloud-based design and verification technologies can provide. It has, however, become more challenging to forecast compute needs, leading engineers to underestimate the compute and EDA resources they need while experiencing growing systemic complexity.
To date, chip development teams have been leveraging a "bring your own cloud" (BYOC) approach offered by Synopsys and other EDA vendors, where chip development teams are required to source compute infrastructure from public cloud service providers but in doing so are frequently constrained by pre-defined design and verification capacity.
Synopsys has been working closely with Microsoft to transform the landscape through a software-as-a-service (SaaS) chip development solution on the Microsoft Azure cloud computing platform. With the SaaS approach, customers can directly access and pay as they go for cloud compute resources and for any Synopsys cloud-enabled design and verification product.
Customers who already use cloud resources through a BYOC model can also take advantage of Synopsys Cloud and its pay-per-use cloud-enabled EDA tools. The collaboration with Microsoft Azure will enable design teams to benefit from flexibility and faster time-to-market, addressing today's systemic complexities in chip design and verification.
Synopsys is also working together with major foundries to streamline access to required manufacturing collateral for use with its cloud-optimised products. The roadmap for the collaboration aims to provide customers with a flexible, cloud-optimized approach for accessing and managing foundry collateral.
"Our new Synopsys Cloud offering promises to be transformative, providing designers the ability to scale up or down in response to their dynamic chip design and verification needs," said Sassine Ghazi, president and chief operating officer at Synopsys. "As more design flows incorporate AI, requiring even more resources, the virtually unlimited compute and EDA access we're providing will lay the foundation for new levels of semiconductor innovation while delivering a flexible, secure chip development environment for future demands."
Commenting Rani Borkar, Corporate Vice President, Azure Hardware Systems & Infrastructure at Microsoft added, "Addressing systemic complexity along with interdependent design flows in chip design requires more compute and EDA resources than ever before.
“Microsoft Azure continues to scale its high-performance computing infrastructure with the availability, affordability and capacity to handle advanced chip design and verification workloads. The Synopsys Cloud software-as-a-service solution has been purpose-built on Microsoft Azure for EDA workloads, delivering a flexible design and verification environment to foster the productivity that design teams need."
