Jun 8 2015
ProPlus Design Solutions, Inc., has partnered with Runtime Design Automation (RTDA) and Zentera Systems Inc. to demonstrate its SPICE simulation and design for field (DFY) software in the cloud at the 52nd Design Automation Conference (DAC).
NanoSpice™, a high-performance parallel SPICE simulator, and NanoYield™ statistical analysis from ProPlus will be managed by the NetworkComputer™ workload manager from RTDA, provider of infrastructure and design optimization software solutions. The tools will run on a public cloud powered and secured by the Zentera™ Cloud Overlay Network hybrid cloud solution.
At advanced nodes, designers have increasing need to run more SPICE simulations for accurate characterization, and statistical variation analysis, such as process, voltage, temperature (PVT) corner analysis, Monte Carlo analysis, and high sigma analysis, during the verification stage. Most of these jobs can be run in parallel and distributed to an enterprise computer farm or other computing resources available in a public cloud. This gives designers flexibility and saves time without the cost of additional hardware resources for more complete verification runs and improved design for chip yield and power, performance and area (PPA).
Moving computing to the cloud is a widespread trend, even though the semiconductor industry has been slow to adopt a cloud strategy. However, security, intellectual property protection and cost-benefit considerations have limited cloud adoption. The partnership with RTDA and Zentera offers the benefits of ProPlus' circuit simulation and DFY technologies combined with throughput maximization and capacity utilization enabled by RTDA's workload manager solutions, and secured cloud access powered by Zentera's hybrid cloud solution.
"Semiconductor designers never have enough compute resources," comments Dr. Jaushin Lee, chief executive officer (CEO) of Zentera Systems, Inc. "Zentera's secure hybrid cloud networking solution solves that challenge for RTDA and ProPlus SPICE customers. Our next-generation, auto-provisioning capability enables designers to dynamically expand and contract cloud-based compute resources."
"We continue to work closely with our customers as they adopt Cloud based solutions," says Dr. Andrea Casotto, founder and CEO of Runtime. "Our scalable products are strategically positioned to take advantage of the emerging secure cloud. NetworkComputer's low latency and scalable architecture allows it to efficiently handle large distributed EDA applications, maximizing throughput and capacity utilization both critical to fully realizing the business benefits of on-demand cloud-enabled EDA solutions."
The partners' live demonstration, shown daily at the Zentera booth (#520), will highlight how design teams can maximize compute capacity in secure chambers for highly scalable SPICE simulations in the cloud.
"We see a huge opportunity for characterization and verification in the cloud, especially for those companies with no access to big computing facilities," remarks 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."
Source: http://www.proplussolutions.com/