Practical applications of cloud computing in semiconductor chip design
February 7, 2013
Grazed from Chip Design Magazine. Author: Editorial Staff.
Chip design engineers face a myriad of challenges in their work, be it brainstorming ways to implement a certain feature set, figuring out how to meet performance requirements (and still stay within budget), or running enough simulations and compilations to verify functionality and test coverage before manufacture. These are the processes that bring our smartphones, smart TVs, industrial robots and most other electronics to life. Over the years, much thought and hard work has also been put into improving design methodologies, software tools and computing hardware for chip design, in order to shorten product time-to-market and lower development costs. Today, the cloud can help with this, by dramatically accelerating chip design workflows.
Cloud computing has steadily made inroads into the enterprise; therefore it comes as little or no surprise that a compute-intensive endeavor such as semiconductor chip design will find practical applications for the cloud. The prospect of scaling computation resources on-demand and running simulations and compilations in parallel is attractive–both for IT departments and for design teams…
One application of cloud computing is in FPGA design, where designers offload synthesis and place-and-route tasks for more efficient processing. When an engineer is in the field, for example, he or she may be debugging multiple designs at the same time, making changes and re-running compilation builds to test those changes. Many designs take up large amounts of CPU and memory resources, making it difficult to get several designs done in a timely fashion. With access to a remote server farm, the engineer can quickly launch a bunch of synthesis and place-and-route builds in parallel, simultaneously trying different debug strategies…
Read more from the source @ http://chipdesignmag.com/print.php?articleId=5211?issueId=0