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Today¡¯s market forces have changed the model for chip manufacturers from ¡°innovate to succeed¡± to ¡°innovate or perish.¡± The cloud is an excellent tool for creating and testing modern chips to respond to these forces. This post breaks down some of the main benefits of adopting cloud technology for chip design.

Benefits of Adopting Cloud Technology

Scalability and Elasticity

The cloud provides instant access to vast computing and storage resources for chip design and verification. Chip design demands vary cyclically and unpredictably throughout the process, so scalability and elasticity are both essential cloud benefits. 

Your chip design team can leverage automated provisioning and easy-to-manage environments offered by cloud providers. You can utilize as many machines for regressions, timing analysis and physical verification as you need. Once your team members complete each step, they can return the resources to the cloud and stop the charges.

Faster-time-to-Market

In recent years, modern chip complexity has increased multifold, while the life cycles for products using chips have considerably reduced. Concurrently, demand for chip makers to ensure faster time-to-market grows daily.

With cloud computing, you receive scalable storage and major data analytics capabilities. You also have access to enhanced productivity with collaboration tools that enable rapid product development and launches. The cloud allows you to leverage high-performance computing (HPC) power with virtual machine images, enabling quicker design and development cycles.

Data and Analytics Insights

The design of a chip varies with each release. Most likely, your organization uses families of chips in incremental progression cycles. You must therefore log, analyze, and process your chip lifecycle data for value generation. Cloud service providers offer unlimited storage and analytics capabilities that enable the use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) tools for data processing and analytics.

Operational and Cost Efficiencies

Chip companies can use the cloud to focus on core products rather than update their infrastructure. Traditional infrastructure creates chronic capacity and demand mismatch, resulting in engineers or servers sitting idle. 

Comparatively, the cloud offers instant scale capabilities to perform and execute operations across the chip value chain from design to yield. You can access these capabilities without investing in physical on-premises data centers, which reduces infrastructure costs. 

The cloud provides a collaborative infrastructure to review and test chip designs while offering feedback irrespective of the stakeholders¡¯ locations. You can thus improve cost efficiencies via increased uptime with predictive maintenance capabilities and infrastructure security.

Organizational Agility and Flexibility

Other benefits of adopting cloud technology include organizational agility and flexibility. The use cases for chips are ever-expanding. Your company must be highly agile. It also must have the ability to access on-demand scalability and flexibility to ramp up and down your computing infrastructure. Agility and flexibility are essential to accommodate design, testing, and validation activities, as well as research and development. 

The cloud offers analytical capabilities to help you draw insights and make quicker decisions. It provides ample cost benefits, security, and efficiency.

Innovation Driver

Cloud infrastructure can drive innovation for chip makers. It allows you to leverage IoT, AI, ML, and big data analytics to gain visibility and drive efficiencies throughout the chip manufacturing value chain. The cloud also provides electronic design automation (EDA) support, high-performance design, HPC, and high-volume manufacturing capabilities to increase innovation at lower costs.

Security

Some chip designers have resisted cloud adoption because of security concerns. Cloud providers now offer automated security tools and best practices, such as data encryption in motion and at rest. They have also made significant security investments to protect customers against threats, relying on larger security teams than most companies can afford. Cloud providers¡¯ investments ensure the security of their cloud infrastructure, another added advantage for the chip manufacturing industry to ensure data and IP protection. 

Foundry Improvements

For chip foundries, the cloud presents a secure and auditable channel to supply their process design kits (PDKs) to their semiconductor customers. Gone are the days of transferring large amounts of data through traditional internet upload and download processes.

In addition, the cloud offers a single truth source for storing, processing, analyzing, and inferring generated data. Foundries can use these data insights for predictive performance and analytics as well as management of resources and the chip supply chain, improving production uptime and yield. The cloud also enables improved fault detection in the production line using imaging techniques and intelligent analytics tools.