Achronix Achieves 5X Faster Physical Verification for Full SoC Within Budget with Synopsys Cloud

With its high-end field programmable gate array- (FPGA-) based data acceleration solutions, Santa Clara, California-based Achronix Semiconductor Corporation is ready to help design teams take on compute-intensive workloads in application areas such as artificial intelligence (AI), machine learning (ML), automotive driver assistance, communications, compute acceleration, industrial, and military. Founded in 2004, the privately held fabless company is the only supplier with both high-performance, high-density standalone FPGAs and licensed eFPGA IP solutions. Ready-to-use PCIe accelerator cars further enhance the company’s offerings. All its products are supported by best-in-class electronic design automation (EDA) tools.

Faced with aging compute resources, infrastructure scalability limitations, and resource constraints, Achronix recognized a need to change its chip design environment. Otherwise, these challenges could create longer design cycles, extended time to results, and unpredictability. The company adopted Synopsys Cloud, with its cloud-native EDA tools and pre-optimized hardware platforms, for all its SoCs, reducing full-chip SoC physical verification from 80 hours with on-premises resources down to 16 hours for one of its chips.

“Synopsys Cloud offers a complete design environment to design SoCs,” said Chris Pelosi, vice president of Hardware Engineering at Achronix. “Highly elastic EDA and compute resources provide excellent flexibility and remove barriers for on-time delivery of designs. Synopsys Cloud has helped us reimagine how we plan and execute SoC design projects on cloud. With the ability to deliver complete designs at a much quicker pace, we can optimize future roadmap schedules for improved verification and higher quality designs ahead of schedule.”

Faster Turnaround Times, Higher Productivity

Moving its design environment to the cloud also eliminated licensing-related challenges. Because its traditional EDA licenses were not available in a scalable or on-demand manner, Achronix felt constrained when its projects required varying levels of compute and license resources for EDA workloads. In addition, the time spent managing and scaling license servers impacted productivity.

Through a seamless, browser-based environment, Synopsys Cloud provides EDA software and access to the latest compute resources. License server management is completely automated and scalable.

“With aging compute and scalability challenges, existing on-premise resources were not sufficient for peak compute requirements during various stages of the SoC design,” said Pelosi. “We wanted a scalable, secure, and reliable cloud-based design environment that we could leverage along with our existing on-premise environment. Synopsys Cloud provided us with complete flexibility and scalability to leverage cloud for EDA tools and infrastructure when needed. To complement cloud’s scalability and elasticity, Synopsys Cloud also offers true pay-per-use FlexEDA licenses. With unlimited, on-demand licenses of Synopsys IC Validator® running on Synopsys Cloud, our full-chip SoC physical verification got completed in 16 hours instead of 80 hours. Other key benefits include being able to run EDA tools from on-premises without having to manage license servers and taking advantage of bursts on demand for scalable, elastic EDA workloads. These are among the many features that make Synopsys Cloud a true differentiator and leader for EDA on cloud.”

Achronix got its Synopsys Cloud production environment up and running in 15 hours. Faster physical verification thanks to unlimited, on-demand access to EDA tools meant the company was able to execute more iterations faster and find and fix issues early in the design cycle. 

Flexible Licensing and Deployment Options

The Synopsys Cloud FlexEDA business model comes with two licensing options. The pay-per-use (PPU) option is a usage-based licensing approach with metered pricing for EDA tools, while a cloud subscription license (CSL) option involves cloud credits and upfront payment. Synopsys Cloud can be deployed through a Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) or a Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) model.

Read other Synopsys Cloud customer success stories here.