The Future of Electronic Design Automation (EDA)

There's been a lot of growth in the electronic design automation (EDA) industry, which is essential to the success of the semiconductor and electronic systems industries. With more companies designing their own chips and electronics, what does the future of electronic design automation hold? Here we’ll discuss growing trends in EDA, including cloud adoption.

Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning

The use of artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) technology is growing rapidly due to many new applications. The result is chip makers need to produce more complex integrated circuits (ICs) like CPUs and GPUs with hundreds of cores, terabytes of memory, and multiple high-speed communication channels. They also require increasingly sophisticated EDA tools.

Furthermore, developers often identify a need to build dedicated logic and algorithms to optimize AI performance without compromising power consumption. EDA tools need to work with higher abstraction levels to get the right AI architecture. 

While EDA can help with AI solution design, AI can also improve EDA tools. Recently, EDA vendors have begun integrating AI and ML into their EDA tools. ML can boost EDA performance because it requires large amounts of data to be effective, and EDA produces large amounts of data.

Domain-Specific Design

A shift toward domain-specific architectures is spawning a scramble among EDA tool vendors to simplify and optimize existing methodologies and tools. There's a push for architectures optimized for hyper-scale computing, automotive, mobile, communications, aerospace/defense, industrial, and medical applications.

Domain-specific design, also known as design for context, is driven by increased system complexity, performance and cost tradeoffs, and shortened development cycles. To address these issues, EDA vendors and users see closer collaboration in the ecosystem from developers of components, subsystems, and systems to address integration challenges and optimize performance.

Several opportunities and challenges for EDA tool providers are associated with this trend.

• The creation of collaborative workflows enables many specialists to work efficiently and effectively across design and test phases, including better management of processes, data, and intellectual property (IP).
• EDA tool providers use model-based system engineering (MBSE), with hierarchical design and varying levels of fidelity depending on the simulation type (circuit, system, or network). 
• Models, including measurement-based models, have improved, increasing simulation accuracy. Development teams can reduce validation and verification risks and iterative and costly physical prototyping with accurate simulations earlier in the design process. 
• High-performance computing (HPC) and parallelization in the cloud have increased the ability to improve simulation speed and accuracy.
  

As part of design-for-context, EDA vendors should form closer partnerships and interoperability between EDA, computer-aided design, and computer-aided engineering tools. For increased productivity, EDA tools should be integrated with product lifecycle management systems, and simulation and test processes should be improved.

Boost Performance with Synopsys Cloud

With Synopsys Cloud, you'll be able to do more with cloud-based EDA than ever before. 

Their cloud-based metering technology enables you to run unlimited parallel and regression jobs on-demand, making results available in minutes instead of weeks. No matter how much demand there is, everything is always available.

With unlimited EDA licenses on demand, you can manage the tools and compute resources you need without traditional licensing restrictions.

Synopsys values the security and privacy of your data and IP. Synopsys Cloud ensures complete data isolation and encryption in transit and at rest for each deployment. The software integrity platform identifies and eliminates vulnerabilities in code before each release is enabled.

The security measures include multi-factor authentication, role-based access, a dedicated network with workload protection, vulnerability management, and round-the-clock incident response.

By leveraging Synopsys’ innovative technology, small and medium-sized businesses can maximize their electronic design automation workflows and efficiency.