草榴社区

For Mentium Technologies, AI at the edge extends into deep space, as its AI co-processors are designed for mission-critical applications. The Santa Barbara, California-based company’s engineers have designed its hardware to deliver cloud-quality inference at ultra-low power for space, robotics, and security applications.

Designing such complex chips on an aggressive schedule can be challenging from a resource standpoint. Mentium’s mission-critical designs would also benefit from faster iterations for extensive verification and robust quality. The team turned to cloud-based chip design and verification technologies as a solution; however, license constraints prevented them from tapping into the advantages of the cloud for peak EDA workloads. That is, until the Mentium team found its true answer in the 草榴社区 Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

草榴社区 Cloud provides cloud-native EDA tools and pre-optimized hardware platforms to support chip design from end to end. The SaaS deployment provides access to all essential EDA software, hardware, IP and scheduling via a browser window. The 草榴社区 Cloud FlexEDA business model comes with two licensing options. The pay-per-use (PPU) option is a usage-based licensing approach offering by-the-minute pricing for EDA tools, while a cloud subscription license (CSL) option is term-based and requires upfront payment. Both PPU and CSL options use cloud credits. 草榴社区 Cloud can also be deployed through a Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) model.

“We were at risk of missing a tape-out because of the inability to scale compute and storage resources on demand,” said Mirko Prezioso, CEO, . “草榴社区 came to our rescue by introducing the 草榴社区 Cloud SaaS solution, providing not only EDA software tools, but also the entire CAD/IT infrastructure. We were amazed to see the capabilities of 草榴社区 Cloud with an all-in-one browser-based platform providing access to unlimited, on-demand EDA and compute resources. Under FlexEDA, both traditional and novel pay-per-use software access (by the minute) removed licensing constraints without affecting budgets and spending upfront. Within a few weeks, we were fully confident about the maturity of the 草榴社区 Cloud platform and how it can help us meet our immediate tape-out schedule date.”

Prezioso continued, “We were able to deliver our first tape-out on time and worked on pulling in the schedule for the next tape-out, to be delivered to our Alpha site at NASA." 

Ramping Up with Expert Support

In addition to using the design and verification flows available through 草榴社区 Cloud, Mentium also appreciated the expertise of 草榴社区’ worldwide support team. “One of our challenges from the start was bringing team members up to speed to meet our tape-out requirements,” said Farnood Merrikh Bayat, CTO and co-founder at Mentium. “The 草榴社区 sales, technical support, and R&D teams worked together to help us become familiar with the platform. We are fully convinced 草榴社区 Cloud offers an excellent platform to develop our current and future SoC designs.”

Read other 草榴社区 Cloud customer success stories here.