Pay-per-Use electronic design automation
Beyond a shadow of a doubt the power of the cloud will dramatically boost productivity of EDA. The rat race of large enterprises with annual licenses costing typically 10,000 to 50,000 Euros is clearly not sustainable for a small IC designer that may do at most one or two tape-outs per year.
Nor can an SME afford buying and maintaining extra powerful hardware for the resource greedy verification stage. PolytEDA Cloud was founded in 2015 precisely to address this problem. With its headquarters and R&D located in Kiev, Ukraine, the startup has a strong focus on the EU market. The company approach implied for increase of PV affordability through moving PV to a cloud environment allowing for pay-per-use model.
The approach has proven to be quite effective. As Sarah Cooper, GM of IoT Solutions at Amazon Web Services, highlighted in her keynote, cloud was one of the main focus areas of this year DAC.
PolytEDA Cloud predicted the trend of the EDA industry as early as in 2015 and began working in this direction. Whereas EDA big guns have just started to encourage EDA moving to a cloud, many European IC designers have already evaluated the innovative solution and started benefiting from the affordable state-of-the-art PV services offered by the Ukrainian company in cooperation with key European foundries.
PolytEDA Cloud leans heavily on the real world experience gained by PolytEDA LLC that has been delivering advanced PV tools such as PowerDRC/LVS since 2009. The tool has been silicon-proven many times at 250 to 40nm nodes and shown to be effective up to 28nm. The aim was to provide a full suite of cloud-based PV tools accessible from any location worldwide simply by entering a URL into a web browser followed by a secured two-steps authentication. Obviously, to achieve that you need to also provide a fully managed billing solution as well as address the concerns over IP protection.
Having entered the EU Horizon 2020 competition, PolytEDA Cloud became the first Ukrainian company to be granted funding through this route and the PVCloud solution was born as the result. This unique solution allows IC designers to access PV tools and powerful multi-CPU machines on an hourly pay-as-you-use basis 24/7/365, giving them control over costs but still allowing them to confirm that their designs are compliant with foundry rule sets.
For those users who would like to evaluate PVCloud right away, a version is available hosted in secure and efficient Amazon AWS cloud. The evaluation is free, and you are granted $25 worth tokens for the purpose on registration. As we move toward a world where cloud-based services become an increasing part of our daily lives, PolytEDA Cloud has taken the first steps toward introducing the PV SaaS/IaaS model to the EDA world and opening up an entirely new eco-system aimed at the small and medium enterprise sector, which has traditionally not been able to meet the high cost barriers of the traditional licence-based models.
About the author:
Iryna Novostavska is in charge of communication at PolytEDA Cloud – www.polyteda-cloud.com
Related article:
Cloud-based DRC/LVS tools: affordable EDA for SMES
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