harry … the ASIC guy

Although I had heard his name mentioned quite often, it wasn’t until this year at DAC that I finally met Scott Clark  for the first time. Scott was describing how, as Director of Engineering Infrastructure at Broadcom, he led a project to virtualize Broadcom’s internal data center in order to transform it into a private cloud. It was a great discussion. We had lunch a few weeks later to talk about his new business, Deopli, a company that he has founded to help other semiconductor and EDA companies improve their compute infrastructure operations in similar fashion.

So, when I saw Dan Nenni’s blog post on cloud computing and some of the responses, I thought I’d contact Scott. You see, as opposed to most of those commenting on Dan’s post, Scott has actually taken EDA tools and moved them to the cloud, so he knows what he’s talking about. Scott was kind enough to contribute a blog post on the subject, so please enjoy.

__________

Harry the ASIC Guy pointed me to Dan Nenni’s Silicon Valley Blog to take a look at this post regarding Daniel Suarez’s books Daemon and Freedom. His post intrigued me enough to download the first book to my iPad to get a feel for the style and atmosphere. That was good enough that I plan to read both. You can read Dan’s post to see his overview of the books, but at the end of his post, he poses a question that seemed to spark lots of conversation and varying opinions. His question was “Who can be trusted to secure Darknet (Cloud Computing)?”

I think Dan was making reference to concepts in the book where all data in the world becomes controlled by a finite set of service providers, and therefore creates an exposure based on the singularity of the solution. His references hit pretty close to home in Apple, Microsoft and Google, but that did not seem to be the focus of the responses. Because Dan’s background (and blog) is primarily in the EDA / Semiconductor space, the responses seemed to fall into the category of “Should Semiconductor companies use Cloud Computing?” and the array of opinions seemed to align on the two ends of the spectrum. There were a few respondents who felt that EDA would never ever move into the Cloud or gave somewhat skewed definitions of “cloud” to say “it’s impossible” but for the most part, it was refreshing to see some open minded views of what was possible and how things could work. I was particularly intrigued by Dan’s comment that he felt foundries would venture into the cloud hosting space. Given the history of the fabless semiconductor space, how can that not make perfect sense! The leadup to the creation of foundries was that internal manufacturing was growing in capacity and complexity to the point that it made more sense to have that done externally. The same dynamics are happening in the datacenter space for chip design today.

Some of the comments were very accurate in my experiences, so just to highlight a few (please read the blog for specifics so I don’t mis-quote). Daniel Payne made the observation that semiconductor companies will start by creating their own private cloud, and that is exactly where we are today (compute clusters really are private clouds). James Colgan injected sanity throughout and made some very astute observations about the functional dynamics and applicability of cloud to certain parts of a design flow. I can’t say how much I agree with Kevin Cameron’s comments on security; cloud has the potential to be a huge boost in security for the industry. Tom Anderson indicated that he is already doing chip design using Amazon EC2 resources, and I think there are many more like Tom out there. One of the last postings to date is by Lou Covey, and his opinion is that Cloud for the industry is inevitable - I happen to agree with that. It’s not that we “have to” but more of “this is the right answer for the business, and we should do the right thing”.

One of the missing concepts that I notice is that this blog is looking at generic cloud solutions, and not industry specific solution. You will see the development of EDA specific cloud solutions that is very focused on EDA customers, and in the beginning it will be private clouds with technology added to elastic expansion. That said, looking at Cloud for the EDA industry, there are still going to be several roadblocks to adoption that will need to be addressed:

• Ego – getting around the perception that IT is a core competency of chip design companies. The core competency of a chip design company should be … chip design.
• Cost – getting around the expectation that cloud should cost ½ as much as what I am currently paying. There are many economies of scale and efficiencies that cloud brings. Cloud is an opportunity for cost avoidance as time goes forward, not a refund policy.
• Trust – letting go of what is a critical function / resource and having confidence that you can still get the results necessary. This industry has a very powerful model to refer to. In this case, how the fabs were released, and successful partnerships were formed.
• Control – how to let go of a critical resource, and still maintain control over the resources, costs, schedules, and dynamics of capacity / priority decisions.
• Security – probably the most wielded blade in the “you can’t do it” arsenal, but also probably the most misunderstood.
• Performance – the final roadblock, which is the one with the most technical merit, is performance. There are many different facets to performance, but it will primarily fall into “internal cluster performance” and “display performance”.

My perspective, the ego part we can get around. Current conversations with many EDA companies indicate they are already leaning this direction, which is a good sign.

The cost issue is far more ambiguous. There are as many expectations of cloud as there are definitions, but invariably the expectations are rooted in economics. Given that, the only answer seems to be to create a realistic model for cost, present the data, and let nature take it’s course. There really is cost benefit, so companies will want to accomplish that

Trust seems like it should be the easy part for this industry, but it is proving to be more stubborn than that. I think that is mostly because of the implied threat to job security for the people who are currently performing the tasks (who are usually the people receiving the presentation about outsourcing their job). EDA companies should examine their own history to see what to do and how to do it.

The control front falls into the same category as trust. The same way that fabless semiconductor companies created internal organizations and positions for managing the outsource of the foundries, that model should be applied to the outsourcing of computational infrastructure. That is not to say there will not be contention issues for capacity and priority. The cloud suppliers will need to make sure they have enough resources so they can provide sufficient capacity to the customers, or they will not be the supplier long. Again, foundries will be a great model to look at for this.

On the security front, Cloud will at a minimum give data points to show how weak internal security has been historically. Applying best security practices in a consistent manner should actually help evolve an industry specific cloud security solution to better address security issues. And for the time being, we can just avoid the multi-tenant aspects of security by maintaining isolation – private clouds with share dynamic resources.

And finally, given that we are stalking about EDA specific clouds, they will be specifically designed to have “internal cluster performance” appropriate for EDA. It will be designed exactly like we would design that cluster for a companies private datacenter. The tricky part will be in addressing display performance issues for functions like custom layout and board design where network latency causes the engineer’s working style to be impacted.

So really this boils down to proper execution by the EDA cloud providers, and one technical hurdle of display latency, which has many ways to be addressed. There is a lot of money and attention being aimed at these issues and this industry, and really no real reason why it will not succeed. There might be some companies that choose to adopt at a slower rate than others, but I believe this will become the direction everyone goes eventually. Thanks Dan for a great read and thanks Harry for pointing me at it.

__________

Scott Clark has been an infrastructure solution provider in the EDA/Semiconductor industry for the last 20 years, working for companies like Western Digital, Conexant, and Broadcom. He holds a bachelors of science in applied mathematics from San Diego State University and is currently President and CEO of Deopli Corporation. You can follow Scott on his blog at HPC in the Clouds.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/optical_illusion/ / CC BY 2.0

What’s a blog without some sort of obligatory year end TOP 10 list?

So, without further ado, here is my list of the TOP 10 events, happenings, occurrences, observations that I will remember from 2009. This is my list, from my perspective, of what I will remember. Here goes:

1. Verification Survey - Last February, as DVCon was approaching, I thought it would be interesting to post a quickie survey to see what verification languages and methodologies were being used. Naively, I did not realize to what extent the fans of the various camps would go to rig the results in their favor. Nonetheless, the results ended up very interesting and I learned a valuable lesson on how NOT to do a survery.
2. DVCon SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable - One of the highlights of the year was definitely the impromptu panel that I assembled during DVCon to discuss Software-as-a-Service and Cloud Computing for EDA tools. My thanks to the panel guests, James Colgan (CEO @ Xuropa), Jean Brouwers (Consultant to Xuropa),  Susan Peterson (Verification IP Marketing Manager @ Cadence), Jeremy Ralph (CEO @ PDTi), Bill Alexander (VP Marketing @ Blue Pearl Software), Bill Guthrie (VP Marketing @ Numetrics). Unfortunately, the audio recording of the event was not of high enough quality to post, but you can read about it from others at the following locations:
   

   > 3 separate blog posts from Joe Hupcey (1, 2, 3)

   > A nice mention from Peggy Aycinena

   > Numerous other articles and blog posts throughout the year that were set in motion, to some extent, by this roundtable

3. Predictions to the contrary, Magma is NOT dead. Cadence was NOT sold. Oh, and EDA is NOT dead either.
4. John Cooley IS Dead - OK, he’s NOT really dead. But this year was certainly a turning point for his influence in the EDA space. It started off with John’s desperate attempt at a Conversation Central session at DAC to tell bloggers that their blog sucks and convince them to just send him their thoughts. For those who took John up on his offer by sending their thoughts, they would have waited 4 months to see them finally posted by John in his December DAC Trip report. I had a good discussion on this topic with John earlier this year, which he asked me to keep “off the record”. Let’s just say, he just doesn’t get it and doesn’t want to get it.
5. The Rise of the EDA Bloggers.
6. FPGA Taking Center Stage - It started back in March when Gartner issued a report stated that there were 30 FPGA design starts for every ASIC start. That number seemed very high to me and to others, but that did not stop this 30:1 ratio from being quoted as fact in all sorts of FPGA marketing materials throughout the year. On the technical side, it was a year where the issues of verification of large FPGAs came front-and-center and where a lot of ASIC people started transitioning to FPGA.
7. Engineers Looking For Work - This was one of the more unfortunate trends that I will remember from 2009 and hopefully 2010 will be better. Personally, I had difficulty finding work between projects. DAC this year seemed to be as much about finding work as finding tools. A good friend of mine spent about 4 months looking for work until he finally accepted a job at 30% less pay and with a 1.5 hour commute because he “has to pay the bills”. A lot of my former EDA sales and AE colleagues have been laid off. Some have been looking for the right position for over a year. Let’s hope 2010 is a better year.
8. SaaS and Cloud Computing for EDA - A former colleague of mine, now a VP of Sales at one of the small but growing EDA companies, came up to me in the bar during DAC one evening and stammered some thoughts regarding my predictions of SaaS and Cloud Computing for EDA. “It will never happen”. He may be right and I may be a bit biased, but this year I think we started to see some of the beginnings of these technologies moving into EDA. On a personal note, I’m involved in one of those efforts at Xuropa. Look for more developments in 2010.
9. Talk of New EDA Business Models - For years, EDA has bemoaned the fact that the EDA industry captures so little of the value ($5B) of the much larger semiconductor industry ($250B) that it enables. At the DAC Keynote, Fu-Chieh Hsu of TSMC tried to convince everyone that the solution for EDA is to become part of some large TSMC ecosystem in which TSMC would reward the EDA industry like some sort of charitable tax deduction. Others talked about EDA companies having more skin in the game with their customers and being compensated based on their ultimate product success. And of course there is the SaaS business model I’ve been talking about. We’ll see if 2010 brings any of these to fruition.
10. The People I Got to Meet and the People Who Wanted to Meet Me- One of the great things about having a blog is that I got to meet so many interesting people that I would never have had an opportunity to even talk to. I’ve had the opportunity to talk with executives at Synopsys, Cadence, Mentor, Springsoft, GateRocket, Oasys, Numetrics, and a dozen other EDA companies. I’ve even had the chance to interview some of them. And all the fellow bloggers I’ve met and now realize how much they know. On the flip side, I’ve been approached by PR people, both independent and in-house. I was interviewed 3 separate times, once by email by Rick Jamison, once by Skype by Liz Massingill, and once live by Dee McCrorey. EETimes added my blog as a Trusted Source. For those who say that social media brings people together, I can certainly vouch for that.

harry the ASIC guy

I got an email last week from one the readers of this blog that observed “it would be interesting to learn how to manage both blogs while doing justice to your readers.” He was of course referring to my new blog on Xuropa that I write in addition to this one.

Indeed, this was a concern of mine that I had considered carefully before embarking on the other blog … or so I thought. The other day I wrote a new blog post about how designers want to actually use tools hands-on rather than just listen to product marketing pitches, or webinars, or podcasts. I originally wrote the post for this blog, then decided that it made more sense for the Xuropa blog, and ended up publishing it there (here’s the link). But it could have really gone on either one with small adjustments. I can see that this is now going to be more difficult than I thought.I did a little research online to see how other bloggers are handling writing multiple blogs. One of the suggestions was to set down the objectives of each of the blogs so I could be more clear in my mind and to the readers. I think that’s a good idea. So here goes:

• The Xuropa blog will be focused on ways that EDA companies can do more with less, like cloud computing, online tool access, and software-as-a-service. It will also be written for an audience of EDA sales and marketing professionals. If you are in EDA, you’ll want to subscribe to that blog.
• The harry the ASIC guy blog will include lots of other content and is hopefully valuable for people in all aspects of the semiconductor industry. I’ll discuss general engineering trends, quarterly reports from EDA companies, technical topics, and industry news. If you are a designer, you’ll want to subscribe to this blog.

I’m guessing that many of you will be interested in both topic areas and so it is OK to subscribe to the Xuropa blog and subscribe to this blog. You have my permission. After some time you may find that you are only interested in one of the blogs. That’s OK too, just unsubscribe to the one that doesn’t meet your needs.

Another suggestion was to set realistic expectations for how frequently I’d be publishing a new post. I think that is a good idea as well. I will continue to post on this blog roughly once per week as I have in the past. For some time I was actually closer to 2 posts per week but I have fallen back to once a week and that is about what I can handle now. The other blog is shared with some other folks from Xuropa so I will probably publish there every other week. We’ll see how that goes.

I’d like to ask you each a favor as well. Please help me keep to my commitment. I’ve already made this commitment of public record here, so that alone will provide some pressure. But if I start to post too infrequently or the quality slips or goes off track, let me know. Leave a comment or send me an email.

I would also like to make this blog a little more fresh and collaborative. I’ve said in the past that I learn more from you folks than you learn from me. You are working in hundreds of companies with thousands of years of collective experience. I’d like to see if we can tap into that for all our benefit. So here’s the deal:

• If you have an idea for a blog post, let me know. Leave it as a comment or send me an email. I’ll make sure I give you full credit (unless you want to be anonymous) and link back to your website or LinkedIn profile.
• If you’d like to write a guest blog post, I’m open to that as well. The more viewpoints the better.

Of course, not every suggestion will be used and not every offer of a guest blog post will be accepted. I’ll still make that decision to make sure the content is of high quality. But I won’t censor anything just because I disagree.

Well, I guess that’s it. We’re going to try this 2 blog thing and see how it goes. Wish me luck.

harry the ASIC guy

It was easy to spot the big theme’s at DAC this year. This was the “Year of ESL” (again). The state of the economy and the future of EDA was a constant backdrop. Analog design was finally more than just Cadence Virtuoso. And social media challenged traditional media.

It was harder to spot the themes that were not front and center, that were not spotlighted by the industry beacons, that were not reported by press or bloggers. Still, there were important developments if you  looked in the right places and noticed what was changing. At least one of those themes came across to me loud and clear. This was the year that the clouds started forming over EDA.

If you’ve read my blog for a while, you know I’m not talking about the weather or some metaphor for the health of the EDA industry. You know I am talking about cloud computing, which moved from crazy idea of deluded bloggers to solidly in the early adopter category. Though this technology is still “left of chasm”, many companies were talking about sticking their toes in the waters of cloud computing and some even had specific plans to jump in. Of note:

• Univa UD - Offering a “hybrid cloud” approach to combine on premise hardware and public cloud resources. Many view this as the first step into the cloud since it is incremental to existing on premise hardware.
• Imera Systems - Offering a product called EDA Remote Debug that enables an EDA company to place a debug version of their software on a customer’s site in order to debug a tool issue. This reduces the need to send an AE on site or to have the customer package up a testcase.
• R Systems - A spinoff from the National Center for Supercomputing Applications (best known for Telnet and Mosaic), they were wandering the floor pitching their own high performance computing resources (that they steadfastly insisted were “not a cloud”) available remotely or brought to your site to increase your computing capacity.
• Cadence - One of the first (after PDTi) to have an official Hosted Design Solutions offering, they host their software and your data in a secure datacenter and are looking at the cloud as well for the future.

And then there’s Xuropa.

Before I cover Xuropa, I need to take a brief digression. You see, July 27th was not just the first day of DAC. It was also my first official day working for Xuropa as one of my clients. I’ll be doing social media consulting (blogging, tweeting, other online social community stuff) and also helping their customers get their tools on the Xuropa platform. This is very exciting for me, something I’ll blog about specifically on the Xuropa Blog and also here. In the meantime, under full disclosure, you’ve now been told. You can factor in the appropriate amount of skepticism to what I have to say about cloud computing, hosted design, Software-as-a-Service and Xuropa.

• Xuropa - Offering to EDA companies and IP providers the ability to create secure online labs in the cloud for current and prospective customers to test drive a tool, do tool training, etc. They also have plans to make the tools available for “real work”.

These companies and technologies are very exciting on their own. Still, the cloud computing market is very new and there is a lot of churn so it is very difficult to know what will survive or become the standard. Perhaps something not even on this list will emerge.

Even though the technology side is cloudy (pun intended), the factors driving companies to consider using the cloud are very clear. They all seem to come down to one economic requirement. Doing more with less. Whenever I speak to people about cloud computing (and I do that a lot) they always seem to “get it” when I speak in terms of doing more with less. Here are some examples:

• I spoke to an IT person from a large fabless semiconductor company that is looking at cloud computing as a way to access more IT resources with less of an on premise hardware datacenter.
• Cadence told me that their Hosted Design Solutions are specifically targeted at smaller companies that want to be able to access a complete EDA design environment (hardware, software, IT resources) without making any long-term commitment to the infrastructure.
• EDA and IP companies of all sizes are looking to reduce the cost of customer support while providing more immediate and accessible service.
• EDA and IP companies are looking to go global (e.g. US companies into Europe and Asia) without hiring a full on sales and support team.
• Everyone is trying to reduce their travel budgets.

Naysayers point out that we’ve seen this trend before. EDA companies tried to put their tools in datacenters. There were Application Service Providers trying to sell Software-as-a-Service. These attempts failed or the companies moved into other offerings. And so they ask (rightly) “what is different now?”

There is certainly a lot of new technology (as you see above) that help to make this all more secure and convenient than it was in the past. We live in a time of cheap computing and storage and ubiquitous internet access which makes this all so much more affordable and accessible than before. And huge low cost commodity hardware data centers like those at Amazon and Google never existed before now. But just because all this technology exists so that it can be done, doesn’t mean it will be done.

What is different is the economic imperative to do more with less. That is why this will happen. If cloud computing did not exist, we’d have to invent it.

harry the ASIC guy

I recall taking a course called The Counselor Salesperson when I was an AE at Synopsys. The course was very popular across the industry and was the basis for the book Win-Win Selling. It advocated a consultative approach to sales, one in which the salesperson tries to understand the customer’s problem first and provide a solution that he needs second. Sounds obvious, but how often do you encounter a salesperson who knows he has what you need and then tries to convince you that you have a problem?

One of the techniques in the process is called the “Magic Wand” wherein the salesperson asks the customer “What would it be like if …”. This open-ended type of question is designed to free the customer’s mind to imagine solutions that he’d otherwise not consider due to real or imagined constraints. That’s the type of question I asked last week when I asked: What would you do with 1000 CPU’s? And boy did it free your minds!

Before I go into the responses, you may be wondering what was my point in asking the question in the first place.  Well, not so surprisingly, I’m looking to understand better the possible applications of cloud computing to EDA and ASIC design. If a designer, design team, or company can affordably access a large number of CPUs for a short period of time, as needed, what would that mean? What would they be able to do with this magic wand that they would not even have thought of otherwise?

I received 8 separate responses, some of them dripping with humor, sarcasm, and even disdain. Good stuff! I’ve looked them over and noticed that they seem to fall into 4 groups, each of which highlights a different aspect or issue of this question.

“Rent Them Out”

Gabe Moretti had the best response along these lines, “(I’d) heat my house and pool while selling time to shivering engineers”. Jeremy Ralph of PDTi put some dollar value on the proposition, calculating that he could make $8.25M per month sub-licensing the licenses and CPUs. While Guarav Jalan pointed out that I’d need to also provide bandwidth to support this “pay-as-you-use” batch farm.

The opportunity is to aggregate users together to share hardware and software resources. If I buy a large quantity of hardware and software on a long-term basis at discounted rates, then I can rent it out on a shorter-term basis at higher rates and make money. The EDA company wins because they get a big sale at a low cost-of-sales. The customers win because they get access to tools on a pay-as-you-go basis at lower cost without a long-term commitment. And I win because I get to pocket the difference for taking the risk.

“Philanthropy”

One of the reasons that Karen Bartleson and I get along so well is that we’ve both been around the EDA industry for some time (we’ll leave it at that). As a result, we not only feel connected to the industry, but also some sense of responsibility to give back. Karen would train university student’s on designing SOCs. I’d train displaced workers on tools that can help them find a new job.

Even though this is not really a business model, I think it is still something that the EDA vendors should consider. Mentor is already very active in promoting it’s Displaced Worker Program. Autodesk and SolidWorks are giving away free licenses to the unemployed. This type of program should be universal. Using cloud computing resources is an easy way to make it happen without investing in lots of hardware.

(On a side note: PLEASE, PLEASE encourage anyone you know at Synopsys and Cadence to follow Mentor’s lead. Synopsys did this in 2001 and Cadence once had a “Retool-To-Work” program that was similar. I truly believe that both companies have that same sense of corporate responsibility as Mentor has, but for some reason they have not felt the urgency of the current situation. I am personally going to issue a daily challenge on Twitter to Synopsys and Cadence to follow suit until it happens. Please Retweet.)

“Do Nothing”

John Eaton pointed out that it is very difficult to use any additional capability offered as “pumpkinware” if you know it will evaporate within a month. It would take that long to set up a way to use it. And John McGehee stated that his client already has all the “beer, wine, and sangria” they can drink (New Yorkers - do you remember Beefsteak Charlie’s?), so he’d pass. John: Can you hook me up with your client ?

Seriously,  it certainly requires some planning to to take advantage of this type of horsepower. You don’t just fire off more simulations or synthesis runs or place and route jobs without a plan. For design teams that might have access to this type of capability, it’s important to figure out ahead of time how you will use it and for how long you will need it. If you will be running more sims, which sims will they be? How will you randomize them? How will you target them to the most risky parts of the design?

“Run Lots of Experiments”

Which brings us to Jeremy Ralph’s 2nd response. This one wins the prize as best response because it was well thought out and also addressed the intention of the magic wand question: what problem could you solve that you otherwise could not have solved? Jeremy would use the resources to explore many different candidate architectures for his IP (aka chiplet) and select the best one.

One of the key benefits of the cloud is that anyone can have affordable access to 1000 CPUs if they want it. If that is the case, what sorts of new approaches could be implemented by the EDA tools in addressing design challenges? Could we implement place and route on 1000 CPUs and have it finish in an hour on a 100M gate design? Could we partition formal verification problems into smaller problems and solve what was formerly the unsolvable? Could we run lots more simulations to find the one key bug that will kill our chip? The cloud opens up a whole new set of possibilities.

__________

I’ve learned a lot from your responses. Some were expected and some were not. That’s what’s fun about doing this type of research … finding the unexpected. I’ll definitely give it some thought.

harry the ASIC guy

If I gave you 1000 CPUs to use for a month … and 1000 licenses of any EDA tool you want … what would you do?

What would it be worth?

harry the ASIC guy

My last blog post, entitled The Weakest Lynx, got a lot of attention from the Synopsys Lynx CAEs and Synopsys marketing. Please go see the comments on that post for a response from Chris Smith, the lead support person for Lynx at Synopsys. Meanwhile, the final part of this series … The Missing Lynx.

About 7 months ago, I wrote a blog post entitled Birth of an EDA Revolution in which I first shared my growing excitement over the potential for cloud computing and Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) to transform EDA. About a week later, Cadence announced a SaaS offering that provides their reference flows, their software, and their hardware for rent to projects on a short-term basis. About a week after that, I wrote a third post on this topic, asking WWSD (what will Synopsys do) in response to Cadence.

In that last post, I wrote the following:

Synopsys could probably go one better and offer a superior solution if it wanted to, combining their DesignSphere infrastructure and Pilot Design Environment.  If fact, they have done this for select customers already, but not as a standard offering. There is some legwork that they’d need to do, but the real barrier is Synopsys itself. They’ve got to decide to go after this market and put together a standard offering like Cadence has … And while they are at it, if they host it on a secure cloud to make it universally accessible and scalable, and if they offer on-demand licensing, and if they make it truly open by allowing third party tools to plug into their flow, they can own the high ground in the upcoming revolution.

Although I wrote this over 6 months ago, I don’t think I could have written it better today. The only difference is that Pilot has now become Lynx. “The ASIC Cloud”, as I call it, would look something like this:

As I envision it, Synopsys Lynx will be the heart of The ASIC Cloud and will serve to provide the overall production design flow. The Runtime Manager will manage the resources including provisioning of additional hardware (CPU and storage) and licenses, as needed. The management cockpit will provide real-time statistics on resource utilization so the number of CPUs and licenses can be scaled on-the-go. Since The ASIC Cloud is accessible through any web browser, this virtual design center is accessible to large corporate customers and to smaller startups and consultants. It’s also available to run through portable devices such as netbooks and smartphones.

If you think I’m insane, you may be right, I may be crazy. But it just might be a lunatic you’re looking for. To show you that this whole cloud computing thing is not just my fever (I have been sick this past week), take a look at what this one guy in Greece did with Xilinx tools. He basically pays < $1 per hour to access hardware to run Xilinx synthesis tools on the Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud. Now, this is nothing like running an entire RTL2GDSII design flow, but he IS running EDA tools on the cloud, taking advantage of pay-as-you go CPU and storage resources, and taking advantage of multiple processors to speed up his turnaround time. The ASIC Cloud will be similar and on a much greater scale.

It may take some time for Synopsys to warm up to this idea, especially since it is a whole new business model for licensing software. But for a certain class of customers (startups, design services providers) it has definite immediate benefits. And many of these customers are also potential Lynx customers.

So, Synopsys, if you want to talk, you know where to find me.

__________

That wraps up my 5-part series on Synopsys Lynx. If you want to find the other 4 parts, here they are:

Part 1 - Synopsys Lynx Design System Debuts at SNUG

Part 2 - Lynx Design System? - It’s The Flow, Stupid!

Part 3 - Strongest Lynx

Part 4 - The Weakest Lynx

harry the ASIC guy

I’m still up at the Design Verification Conference (DVCon) and have not had a chance to summarize last evening’s Software-As-A-Service and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable. I will do that over the weekend and have a complete rundown next week, including slides.

In the meantime, I wanted to pass on some information that was announced a week or so ago and which I became aware of just this week. Mentor Graphics has initiated a Displaced Worker Program to provide free training to customers who have lost thier jobs in the last 6 months. Back last Decemeber I had issued a challenge to the EDA vendors to do just this. I don’t know if this challenge had any affect; hopefully they did this because they thought it was the right thing to do.

So far Mentor is the only company that has done this, to my knowledge. I’ve personally had discussions with one other of the “Big 3″, so hopefully they will follow suit. Maybe Mentor’s offer will help prompt them.

What do you think? Should they do this?

harry the ASIC guy

Since conducting the Verification Methodology Poll and publishing the raw results last week, I’ve been planning to follow up with a post that digs a little deeper into the numbers. Things have gotten rather busy in the meantime, both at work and with organizing the SaaS and Cloud Computing EDA Roundtable for next week at DVCon. So I’ve let it slip a little.

Well, I noticed today that the verification methodology poll was referenced in a Cadence blog post by Adam Sherer. The results were somewhat mis-interpreted (in my opinion), so that kicked my butt to post my own interpretations to set the record straight. Says Adam:

According to the poll conducted by Harry Gries in his Harry the ASIC Guy blog, you should go “all in” on the OVM because it is the 2:1 favorite.

In fact, the raw results had VMM with 80 users and OVM with 125 users, a ratio of just over 1.5:1 (1.5625 to be exact). So the 2:1 ratio is not accurate. However, if you add in RVM/Vera users to the VMM numbers, and then add in AVM, eRM, and e users to the OVM numbers, that ratio is more like 1.8:1. Closer, but still not 2:1.

It also indicates that my poll says that “you should go ‘all in’ on the OVM”. I never said that nor does the poll say anything about what you “should do”. The data simply captures what people are planning on using next. If you are inclined to follow the majority, then perhaps OVM is the way to go. By contrast, there is nothing in the poll comparing the technical merits of the various methodologies. So, if you are inclined to make up your own mind, then you have some work to do and my poll won’t help you on that. You’re probably better off visiting JL Gray at Cool Verification.

No poll is perfect and it will be interesting to compare to DVCon and John Cooley polls to see if they are consistent. Here are a few other interesting stats that I pulled out of the poll results:

• 91% of respondents are using some sort of SystemVerilog methodology
• 10% are using both OVM and VMM (although I suspect many of these are consultants)
• 27% are still using e or Vera (more e than Vera)
• 4% are using ONLY VHDL or Verilog (this number may be low due to the skew of respondents towards advanced methodologies)

Again, I welcome you to download the raw data, which you can find in PDF format and as an Excel workbook, and draw your own conclusions.

harry the ASIC guy

I’ve been writing about Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) and Cloud Computing as relates to EDA for some time now. Then back in January I made a New Years resolution to organize a SaaS EDA roundtable at the 2009 Design and Verification Conference (DVCon).  About a month ago I asked for volunteers and several of you have stepped up to help. Now, just a week before DVCon, I’d like to formally announce the event.

The SaaS and Cloud Computing Roundtable will be held from 6:30 - 8:00 pm on Wed Feb 25th in the Monterey/Carmel rooms at the San Jose Doubletree Hotel. This is immediately following the DVCon reception down the hall, so grab a drink and a bite and then wander on over.

SaaS and Cloud Computing are 2 of the hottest trends in the Information Technology and software industries. Some EDA companies have already put their toes in the water. This roundtable will explore the following question: Are they trailblazing the future of the industry or are they chasing an empty fad?

The format will consist of 5 brief (< 10 minute) presentations from people involved in various perspectives in SaaS and cloud computing for EDA:

• Harry Gries (Design Methodology Consultant @ the ASIC guy)
• James Colgan (CEO @ Xuropa)
• Susan Peterson (Verification IP Marketing Manager @ Cadence)
• Jeremy Ralph (CEO @ PDTi)
• Bill Alexander (VP Marketing @ Blue Pearl Software)

This will be followed by an open, and hopefully lively, discussion.

I’m greatly looking forward to this event, especially since I get to collaborate with such a high-powered team and I have no idea what to expect. I truly believe that this could be one of the more interesting events at DVCon this year.

I hope to see many of you there.

harry the ASIC guy