Cloud-Based Chip Design: The Outlook for Cloud EDA Tools

Migration to the cloud is in full swing. Whether you realize it or not, a growing percentage of your life is hosted in the cloud. Your personal finances, your photos, a growing percentage of the work you do for your employer and your entire social media footprint are all hosted on a public computing platform. The trend is undeniable. Some still resist the move to the cloud for various reasons – more on that in a moment. Regardless of the current state, virtually everyone agrees cloud computing will take over as the dominant IT infrastructure. If only we could agree on when that will happen.

There are many analogies that apply here. The easiest one is computing as a utility. Most private individuals and large corporations don't construct their own power plants. It's far more cost-effective to buy electric power off the grid from utility companies that can deliver serious economies of scale. Solar power is changing this dynamic, but it's a supplement strategy vs. a replacement strategy. I do know folks who bought land in the middle of nowhere, far from the grid and set out on a path to become energy self-sufficient. The project quickly became exponentially complex and expensive. Yet, we still have many companies running on-premises data centers – the equivalent to running your own private power grid.

Security is another "buy vs. build" decision. All corporate enterprises possess very sensitive data that is housed in compute farms. Putting it all behind a corporate firewall gives a sense of security and control. When you look a bit closer, there is another dynamic at play, however. The larger and more prominent a corporate entity becomes, the more of a target they become for hackers. This means an ever-escalating investment in that firewall security. We get to another economy of scale issue with this. Public cloud providers are also huge hacking targets. A typical enterprise of this type will invest vast amounts of resources to secure their interface to the outside world. This investment is usually far greater than any one corporate entity can shoulder, no matter its size. The scale tips in the favor of public cloud providers for robust security in this case. The public cloud is where most of your credit card transactions are processed. It tends to be safe.