Google Cloud is expanding their influence in the semiconductor design market. It is caused by the number of cases of using electronic design automation (EDA) tools in cloud environments is increasing. The transformation of paradigm of the existing license based business model (BM) is expected to accelerate as all of the world's top three semiconductor EDA tool companies are building design environments with Google Cloud.
.Cadence announced a collaboration with Google Cloud to advance the semiconductor EDA design ecosystemthis month. Google Cloud created an environment that allows access to various semiconductor design and analysis tools through 'Cadence Cloud Passport'. Semiconductor design customers (fabless) can use variousrequired tools in the cloud. It also provides high-performance computing (HPC) infrastructure. Through this collaboration, the two companies expect that semiconductor engineers will improve their design and verification throughput up to 10 times compared to the existing EDA tool environment. Cadence explains that it can process the semiconductor development project schedule 25% faster.
Synopsys also implemented Google Cloud based semiconductor design verification environment in 2019. Recently, the scope of cooperation has been expanded to cloud-based EDA tools. By using the Google CloudHPC service, it is possible to shorten the period of semiconductor prototyping, which previously took years, but now to only several months. Siemens EDA also secured cases of speeding up AMD chip development projects through Google Cloud. Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens EDA market share in the global EDA tool market is close to 70%.
Existing EDA tools were provided in the form of individual licenses. As the technology evolves into advanced processes, the burden of licensing costs increased, limiting the access of small and medium-sized fabless and semiconductor startups. Recently, as the cloud has been attracting attention as an alternative to the licensing method, cooperation between cloud companies such as Google Cloud and EDA tool companies has strengthened. The understanding between EDA tool companies who want to expand their customer base to the cloud where EDA tool resources can be utilized as much as necessary and cloud companies are aligned. For fabless, it is possible to reduce the total cost by not only using EDA tools at a reasonable price, but also eliminating the need to build a huge information technology (IT) infrastructure required for semiconductor design for high performance computing (HPC).
Google Cloud is targeting the EDA tool market aggressively by creating their own semiconductor team (Silicon Team). eSilicon, Seagate, Kyocera, Broadcom, ASML, Motorola, and other companies have achieved results such as optimizing semiconductor chip design and developing artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning-based microchips through Google Cloud.
Sachin Gupta, Executive Vice President of Google Cloud, said, “We will provide unprecedented capabilities and large-scale access (through Google Cloud) to enable the next wave of innovation in the electronic design and computer-aided engineering (CAE) markets.”
By Staff Reporter Dong-jun Kwon (djkwon@etnews.com)