Mentor, AMD, and Microsoft collaborate on EDA in the cloud

By Omar El-Sewefy – Mentor, A Siemens Business

While cloud processing has been around for years, running integrated circuit (IC) design verification in a cloud environment is just now becoming a safe and practical option. And, as with all new ways of doing things, there is an adjustment period as you learn the ins and outs of the processes and how best to tweak them to achieve maximum benefit.

Want to skip a few steps ahead? Maybe this will help…Mentor, AMD and Microsoft Azure teamed up to work through the requirements and steps needed to set up and run Calibre verification on AMD EPYC servers in the Azure cloud environment. Along the way, they identified some best practices and guidelines that can help your company avoid missteps and get to maximum productivity more quickly.

What kind of productivity, you ask? Well, everyone’s results are going to be different, of course, because no one design is like another, and no company has the exact same resources. However, in a test run using a 7nm chip containing more than 13 billion transistors, adding cloud processing resulted in sub-8-hour DRC runtimes (three iterations/day), compared to the single iteration per day that was possible using the on-premise resources.

Still thinking about it? Download our white paper, Mentor, AMD, and Microsoft collaborate on EDA in the cloud. It explains how your company can transition some or all of your EDA computing to cloud processing to reduce time-to-market and innovate faster, while ensuring it makes sense for your business, both operationally and financially.