High-performance cloud platform reduces circuit design costs for industry and businesses
As integrated circuit design becomes more complex and computing increasingly accessible, electronics developers seek innovative solutions to gain a competitive edge. Great effort has been dedicated to automating manual and labour-intensive phases of the integrated circuit design cycle through electronic design automation (EDA) software. Such automated tools help developers ensure electrical and logical functionality and manufacturability of their products. With EU funding of the project PVCLOUD, Ukrainian company POLYTEDA CLOUD has applied the power of cloud to EDA to greatly boost productivity. PVCLOUD’s ground-breaking solution is an EDA service that offers an integrated cloud environment to jump-start semiconductor design, verification and implementation. Overcoming limitations in existing physical verification tools Accurate physical verification is a prerequisite for successfully designing semiconductor devices. Layout designs are checked to find and fix violations made by developers before being processed for manufacturing at a semiconductor fabrication plant (fab). The check is performed with special EDA tools to test whether the layout meets a certain range of performance and size characteristics specified by the selected process node. Finding violations as soon as they are introduced into the design phase prevents them from propagating into the manufacturing phase. “A violation overlooked at the microchip design stage can cause a million-euro loss for industries. In the automotive industry for example, malfunctioning electronics can result in product recalls or even worse contribute to serious accidents,” notes Alexander Grudanov, POLYTEDA’s Chief Executive Officer. What’s more, physical verification is a time-consuming stage of the design process. “It takes several days for an EDA tool to make an iteration on modern super-large microchips. This significantly limits the capacity and efficiency of the fabs and the semiconductor industry,” adds Grudanov. POLYTEDA CLOUD is addressing these challenges by developing software that centralises at fabs both the preliminary block-level design and the final approved sign-off design of circuits. The customised microcircuit checking tool identifies violations and verifies semiconductor circuit designs before microchips are committed to production. Leveraging the availability of secure, readily available cloud computing technology, it provides a high-performance, highly accurate scalable solution for circuit physical verification that competing tools cannot deliver. Strip processing supports parallel processing scalability on up to 128 central processing units (CPUs) delivering throughput of up to 5 million devices per hour per CPU. This scalability allows design teams to make intelligent trade-offs in processing performance, schedule and budget. Unlike competing solutions, the efficiency of the PVCLOUD platform on multiple CPUs may be evaluated within a few minutes free of charge. Pay-per-use electronics design While on demand cloud-based software solutions have long served other industries, circuit design has lagged due to security concerns. POLYTEDA’s software addresses this concern by allowing electronics engineers to test circuit design right where they are fabricated. Currently, major EDA tool vendors are using a per-seat licence model, a subscription-based solution that depends on the number of users who access the digital service. “Our solution gives electronics engineers more control over the cost, by enabling them to use the service on an hourly pay-per-use basis,” explains Grudanov. POLYTEDA CLOUD is the first company that introduces a pay-per-use model to the EDA world. This opens up an entirely new ecosystem aimed at SMEs, which have not been able to meet the high cost barriers of the traditional licence-based models.
Keywords
PVCLOUD, electronic design automation (EDA), circuit design, physical verification, POLYTEDA CLOUD, central processing units (CPUs), fab, scalability, cloud-based software
