DAC 2015 forecast: Cloudy with a chance of Spice installs
ProPlus Design Solutions is teaming up with Runtime Design Automation (RTDA) and Zentera Systems to demonstrate its Spice simulation and design for yield (DFY) tools running in the cloud at this year’s DAC.
NanoSpice, a parallel Spice simulator, and the NanoYield statistical analysis tool will run on a public cloud powered and secured by Zentera’s Cloud Overlay Network hybrid cloud solution, and controlled by RTDA’s NetworkComputer workload manager.
“We see a huge opportunity for characterization and verification in the cloud, especially for those companies with no access to big computing facilities,” said Dr Zhihong Liu, chairman and CEO of ProPlus Design Solutions. “RTDA and Zentera have devised an innovative solution to enable more companies to run large amounts of Spice and statistical variation analysis in the cloud, securely and economically.”
The increased variability of advanced processes and the desire to verify SoCs in more operating modes means that designers are being asked to run many more Spice simulations, to do accurate characterization, and to check more process, voltage, and temperature (PVT) corners. Most of these jobs can be run in parallel on a public cloud, so design teams can do more verification without buying more hardware.
The DAC demo is meant to address industry concerns about cloud-based IC design, such as security, IP protection and the cost/benefit of a cloud-based approach. The ProPlus tools will be managed by RTDA’s workload manager, which tries to maximize throughout and capacity utilization. Zentera will be providing secured cloud access through its hybrid cloud solution.
“Semiconductor designers never have enough compute resources,” said Dr Jaushin Lee, CEO of Zentera Systems. “Our next-generation, auto-provisioning capability enables designers to dynamically expand and contract cloud-based compute resources.”
Dr Andrea Casotto, founder and CEO of Runtime. “NetworkComputer’s low latency and scalable architecture allows it to efficiently handle large distributed EDA applications.”
The demo is on the Zentera booth (#520).
Meanwhile Library Technologies will be showing off its SolutionWare cell characterization and modeling tools, which run in the cloud. The tools can handle logic cells, IO’s and memories. domino, CML, threshold logic, pulsed flops and more.
Library Technologies says the it has added an auto-configuration capability, and native job distribution and file tracking capability, so that users can run hundreds of simultaneous characterization jobs which can be started, stopped, and restarted with no more effort than a single job running on a single machine, without conflicts. Jobs can be distributed at the cell or sub-cell level.
See them at booth #2728.
