Chip in the Clouds – “Precipitation”
Posted: May 27, 2012 Filed under: Chip in the Clouds | Tags: cloud, EDA, facebook, google, instagram, semico, semiconductor, virtual silicon design methodology Leave a commentChip in the Clouds – “Precipitation”
By Kalar Rajendiran
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kalarrajendiran
Since around the posting of my prior blog [“Chip in the Clouds – Gathering”] to now many events have taken place. Facebook announced its intent to acquire Instagram for $1B in cash and stock, completed its initial public offering, announced an Instagram competitive product by releasing “Facebook Camera” and has been busy addressing the question of whether it disclosed material information about its near term earnings selectively to certain institutional investors. What do these Facebook related events have anything to do with cloud-based chip design? At the surface it looks like nothing and therein lays a major issue.
Facebook or Google, Instagram or Facebook Camera, Google+ or for that matter any internet-based social-media offering cannot work without one important component and that is the semiconductor chip running the computers and server farms that power these social-media platforms and apps. A great majority of the population does not know and/or does not consciously think about this. What would happen if the semiconductor industry goes on strike for a month? This will not happen and neither am I suggesting it but just imagine the impact to the social-media world and the rest of the world if this were to happen. In spite of this key role, semiconductor companies do not receive anywhere close to the relative valuations that social-media companies are receiving. Instagram received a billion dollar valuation after taking in just millions of dollars over a 2-year period to produce an app that allows a user to add effects to photos. Compare that to the billions of dollars that go into the semiconductor industry and the little things that are output (I’m speaking figuratively about the micro sized chips that are produced and literally about the relatively tiny valuations semiconductor companies receive).
As newer complex chips are being designed and produced, the cost to develop these chips has increased multi-fold but the size of the average funding rounds has remained about the same as it was many years ago. Investing in semiconductor companies has become too risky even for VCs. VCs are now able to make smaller investment rounds in social-media companies and see success/failure in a shorter time interval compared to a semiconductor investment.
But that does not mean innovation in semiconductors will come to a halt. Nor does this mean that the semiconductor industry is facing death. But it is true that the industry is going through a serious ailment. Venture capital funding has slowed down to a trickle. In spite of this, as the famous phrase “Life will find a way,” from the movie Jurassic Park, the semiconductor industry will find a way out of this ailment. This is the industry that has been most innovative over its 60-year history in terms of technology as well as its cost-reduction delivery.
Innovative companies have been doing their part to help semiconductor companies deal with the ailment and continue to deliver great new products that benefit the world. The value chain producer model helped chip companies avoid a large portion of their fixed cost investment without sacrificing their ability to design and deliver cutting-edge innovative products. Marseille is utilizing a proprietary Virtual silicon design methodology/technology to rapidly prototype products before committing to silicon thus mitigating silicon respin risks and accelerating time to market for its customers. Marseille could help the industry by licensing this technology to other semiconductor companies who it does not compete with.
SiCAD as a cloud-based silicon design company will allow its customers the ability to extend the EDA tools and IT budgets at the same time enhancing their ability to bring products to market faster. Customers don’t like feeling captive to any supplier. With the recent consolidations in the EDA world, the time is ripe for customers to demand a heterogeneous cloud-based silicon design platform.
Chip in the clouds precipitation has begun. Expect the downpour to continue. Hear directly from customers and suppliers by attending the DAC 2012 panel “Is EDA in the Cloud Just Pie in the Sky?” hosted by Nitin Deo on June 6, 2012 at 1:30pm at the Moscone Convention Center.
Chip in the Clouds – “Gathering”
Posted: April 11, 2012 Filed under: Chip in the Clouds | Tags: chip-design, cloud-computing, EDA-Licenses, EDA-tools, semiconductor-market, venture-capitalist 1 CommentChip in the Clouds – “Gathering”
By Kalar Rajendiran
http://www.linkedin.com/in/kalarrajendiran
Cloud computing is the talk of the tech world nowadays. I even hear commentaries about how entrepreneurs are turned down by venture capitalists for not including a cloud component into their business plan no matter what the core business may be. The commentary goes “It’s cloudy without any clouds.” Add some clouds to your strategy and the future will be bright and sunny.
With such a strong trend, one might have expected companies within the $300B semiconductor market to have adopted “cloud” into their strategies by now and the answer is yes to varying degrees. Large established semiconductor companies as well as semiconductor value chain producer companies have built their enterprise-wide clouds for their engineers to tap into their vast compute farm. But access to the right number of latest and greatest compute resources may not always be available for the task on hand, independent of the size of the compute farm. This is because the compute farm is typically upgraded with new hardware resources on an incremental basis. So although the engineers may have their own private clouds to address the chip design needs, peak-time compute resource needs are not addressed optimally. And then there is the matter of peak-time EDA tools resource. Companies are still limited by the number of EDA tools licenses they own. If you’re a major customer of an EDA tools supplier, it is not an issue as peak-load license needs are addressed through temp licenses or short-term licenses. For everyone else, it is a painful negotiation with their EDA tools supplier. As much planning as can be done, peak-load needs cannot always be predicted well ahead of time. And the longer the negotiation with the EDA supplier takes, the more the customer falls behind on their tapeout schedule and consequently time-to-market schedule.
In other words, today, large to medium sized semiconductor companies have a private cloud for their compute needs and a kludge solution for their EDA license needs given their stature with their EDA suppliers. This solution has many issues. (1) they don’t need to maintain their compute servers but they do only to ensure they have access to compute power on-demand (2) they don’t have an automatic solution to add EDA tools resources on-demand (3) if using an EDA tools supplier’s cloud, customers don’t have a seamless cloud-based design flow simply because the design flow involves tools from more than one supplier.
As for smaller semiconductor companies, they neither have their own private cloud nor do they have the same flexible access to EDA tools licenses on-demand. And if using an EDA tools supplier’s cloud, they face the same issue as the larger customers do.
If a secure cloud-based chip design platform from a third-party company provides EDA supplier-agnostic, seamless design flow where the customer could tap into one particular set of tools for one chip project and a different set of tools (as per their team needs/skills) for a different chip project, that would be the ultimate offering. That ultimate offering is what would be called “Chip in the Clouds” platform.
“Chip in the Clouds” may have sounded a lot like “Head in the clouds.” But it is not. The time has arrived for “Chip in the clouds” platform to play a key role in redefining how chips are designed and implemented. Why do I say this? Stay tuned for future installments of my blog in which I’ll discuss the driving factors for the adoption as well as what is happening in the platform offering space.
