New Synopsys Cloud 4.0 Delivers E-Commerce and ZeBu Cloud SaaS Flows for Greater Flexibility and Scalability

Synopsys continues to be at the forefront of reimagining chip design and verification, unveiling new capabilities in its Synopsys Cloud offering to help semiconductor companies rapidly optimize power, performance, and area (PPA) for advanced chip designs. The latest release that is now available, Synopsys Cloud 4.0, brings to the industry:

• Easy, flexible, and fast license management via a new E-Commerce feature on the Portal
• Deep business insights delivered on a customizable analytics and reporting dashboard
• Fully integrated Synopsys ZeBu® Cloud SaaS flows with scalable, unlimited compute capacity for compile
• Expansion of Synopsys Cloud to photonics: with both Photonics Instance and RSoft™ Photonic Device Tools now enabled
• Heterogeneous clusters and dynamic scaling

As the EDA industry’s first broad-scale cloud software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution, Synopsys Cloud first made headlines by enabling semiconductor companies to efficiently leverage the EDA tools and hardware resources they need to create a wide range of silicon, from monolithic systems on chips (SoCs) to complex multi-die systems. To accelerate time to market, Synopsys Cloud offers an extremely flexible business model with pre-optimized hardware platforms and unlimited, on-demand access to EDA software licenses. Known as FlexEDA, this pay-per-use model allows chip designers to scale as they grow by paying per hour—or per minute—for EDA tools. Our complete browser-based EDA-as-a-Service cloud platform offers chip designers a way to access tools and compute without the need for IT and CAD support.

Read on to learn more about what Synopsys Cloud 4.0 brings to the table. 

Pay as You Go

Perhaps most importantly, the Synopsys Cloud E-Commerce portal enables semiconductor companies to approach chip design more strategically, with project timelines and budgets guiding the use of chip design and verification tools instead of the other way around. To be sure, chip designers can now quickly add credits to their accounts for EDA tools and cloud infrastructure as budgets evolve and timelines shift. 

Governing and Analyzing EDA Tool Use

Synopsys Cloud 4.0 empowers semiconductor design teams to achieve or exceed product goals and schedules by unlocking valuable EDA usage data with in-depth reporting and advanced analytics. Displayed on customizable dashboards through charts and downloadable reports, these actionable deep business insights allow team leaders to granularly manage multiple bring-your-own-cloud (BYOC) or SaaS deployments, while keeping close track of budget and spend for EDA tools and hardware resources. CAD managers now have all the information they need to more effectively allocate EDA tool time and compute resources for each engineer—and can easily set cloud credit quotas at​ the deployment, chamber, or user level.

Unifying Electronic and Photonic Design

Synopsys Cloud 4.0 also introduces a unified electronic and photonic design platform that supports a comprehensive end-to-end flow for designing photonic integrated circuits (ICs). We work closely with foundries to provide ready-to-use process design kits (PDKs) out of the box, so customers can focus on:

• Creating schematics using the Synopsys OptoCompiler™ unified electronic and photonic design platform 
• Co-simulating electronic/optical interfaces for photonic devices, circuits, and systems with the Synopsys OptSim™ graphical user interface and measurement instruments 
• Implementing curvy photonic layouts and physically verifying correctness with the Synopsys IC Validator™ high-performance signoff solution

Our RSoft Photonic Device Tools include the most comprehensive suite of rigorous optical solvers to design passive and active photonic devices and systems, including lasers and VCSELs. No single optical simulation algorithm meets the needs of all applications, and making the right choice is necessary to optimize simulation time and accuracy. The RSoft Photonic Device Tools address this challenge by incorporating a wide range of algorithms that share a common design file and CAD interface, allowing users to toggle between multiple RSoft tools without importing designs or parameters.

Spotlighting Heterogeneous Clusters and Dynamic Scaling

Heterogenous clusters enable chip designers to easily select the virtual machines that best match application requirements in a standardized cluster—and process a wide range of EDA workloads simultaneously. Heterogeneous clusters with EDA-optimized hardware are further augmented by dynamically scaling compute resources in Synopsys Cloud. This innovative technique—which automatically adjusts the number of active nodes in a cluster based on changing workloads—ensures jobs are completed as quickly and efficiently as possible.

Both features are available on the Synopsys Cloud Portal, where designated users can select private or shared clusters, define the heterogenous cluster and its limit, and enable dynamic clustering to deliver performance at an optimized cost.

Designing Chips Faster

Scaling compute-intensive applications in the cloud is no longer optional, especially for AI-driven EDA tools and workloads that require unlimited compute and storage resources. Indeed, a new Meticulous Research report confirms cloud-based EDA in 2023 will comprise the largest share of the overall design automation market due to increasingly complex ICs and sophisticated consumer electronic devices. Cloud-based EDA tools help semiconductor companies reduce human error, improve the design of advanced electronic components, and significantly reduce time to tape out.

When we first launched Synopsys Cloud, our primary goal was to transform the chip design landscape by pairing cloud-native EDA tools with unlimited compute resources and on-demand access to EDA licenses. With heterogeneous clusters and dynamic scaling, ZeBu Cloud SaaS flows, a new E-Commerce portal, and deep business insights, Synopsys Cloud 4.0 is driving new levels of innovation and enabling semiconductor companies to focus on what they do best—design high-performing chips, faster.