Metrics introduces elastic compute to handle peak-time verification

By Chris Edwards |  No Comments  |  Posted: February 1, 2018
Topics/Categories: Blog - EDA  |  Tags: , , , , ,  | Organizations:

Metrics Technologies has launched as a supplier of cloud-based verification tools offering per-minute pricing to deal with the mismatch between license cost and usage requirements that face design teams even when they are able to access compute farms.

According to Metrics, a number of systems and semiconductor companies are hitting problems during periods of peak demand. During these times verification engineers can wait overnight or for several days before regression jobs can be scheduled and run on private farms.

With a cloud offering running on the Google Cloud Platform (GCP), Metrics provides a way to scale up resources dynamically to meet peak-usage demands, pricing access at a flat 4 cents per minute per simulation job. To support cloud usage, Metrics is providing its own RTL simulator, which the company has designed to be compliant with the 2012 IEEE 1800 SystemVerilog standard. It handles constraint solving, SV assertions, waveform debug and implements UVM support.

To support large-scale simulation, the company has built a verification manager tool take care of coverage and regression tasks. In addition, Metrics provides an application programming interface (API) to link with third-party and custom verification-management tools and software. The API covers functions intended for implementing analytics, storage control and indexing tasks.

Previous attempts to provide rental of software tools on remote grid or cloud-based servers have met with concerns over data security and workflow. Metrics claims to have dealt with those, arguing that it has the advantage of relieving users of the need to maintaining their own private clouds and farms.

Companies can specify appropriate role-based permission levels for different users to launch simulation jobs and view pertinent verification results. The data is encrypted during transmission and can be encrypted at rest. Metrics also uses a high-reliability, redundant architecture to protect customer data.

Doug Letcher, president and CEO of Metrics, said: “Metrics has spent almost three calendar-years and over 30 person-years developing a full-featured RTL simulator and verification manager that captures the full potential of the cloud, while allowing instantly adjustable pay-by-the-minute pricing.”

Jim Hogan, Metrics chairman, added: “Cloud technology and a software-as-a-service business model have already been a disruptive force in many industries. Just as the EDA software industry transitioned from perpetual licenses to term licenses over two decades ago, it is inevitable that EDA will ultimately embrace SaaS via cloud solutions. I’ve joined the Metrics board of directors because they have the vision and the technology basis to pioneer this shift.”

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