Cloud Adoption Framework for EDA

A Cloud Adoption Framework (CAF) is the collection of various documentation, practices, tools, and implementation procedures used to accelerate cloud adoption. In this article, we’ll discuss what a cloud adoption framework is and what chip design companies need to know when creating their cloud adoption frameworks.

Utilizing a CAF for EDA can help reduce business risk through increased performance while achieving higher adherence to security standards and improved reliability. Additionally, businesses can enhance their environmental, social, and governance impacts by leveraging insights on improving sustainability. Organizations can also increase revenue through new products and services that reach new customers and market segments.

EDA tools require many different processes, and various types of compute power—each with its own corresponding tools—may be necessary. For this reason, utilizing a CAF in cloud migration is an important step for chip designers to ensure that the diverse types of necessary compute are accessible for simulation, verification, place-and-route, and every other step of the chip-design cycle. 

CAFs span a variety of technology-based, process-based, organizational, and product-related use cases.  Across these use cases, CAFs help migrate and modernize legacy infrastructure, analytics platforms, and applications while enabling digitization and automation of business operations. They allow new data and analytics to create optimization methods that use machine learning to improve customer experiences and help in employee decision-making. 

There is no one path for cloud adoption that fits every organization. However, the main implementation stages follow a similar process. Below, we outline the four primary cloud adoption steps. 

Step 1: Define a Business Strategy

The first step of defining a business strategy includes understanding your organization’s motivations for a cloud strategy. It is important to identify the desired outcomes of cloud adoption and examine what technologies are needed for individual stages of chip design. Establishing a clear outcome and creating a financial model to project the impact of your strategy can help align stakeholders on future decisions. 

Step 2: Develop a Plan

When developing a plan, you’ll want to catalog your digital real estate, create a cloud adoption plan, and define support. Note your organization’s workloads, applications, data sources, virtual machines, and other assets, and evaluate the composition of cloud hosting. For example, semiconductor companies may need to have substantial compute power for simulations, storage space for the simulation outputs, and a complex workflow for verification. Prioritize your most important workloads based on business impact and technical complexity in order to create your cloud adoption plan. Then develop a support plan that includes your organizational needs, potential gaps, and new technologies.

Step 3: Adopt the Cloud

The third step involves preparing and adopting your cloud environment. Depending on your chosen cloud service provider, you may encounter a variety of adoption programs or landing zones. Adoption will include migration, where legacy on-premises applications move to the cloud incrementally. For chip-design companies, specific personnel with knowledge of migration processes for pre-existing data may be hired. At this stage, it’s beneficial to focus on innovation where semiconductor companies can further modernize their digital real estate to increase business and drive product innovation. Examples include infrastructure deployment, operations, and governance that create strong connections between development and operations.

Step 4: Manage the Cloud Adoption Framework

The final step of governing is the most detailed. It includes benchmarking, establishing practices, and identifying risks. Benchmarking requires identifying missed gaps in migration and tracking governance state over time while communicating with your CSP for further governance solutions. Establishing a governance practice includes implementing a minimally viable product to establish initial practices based on cost measures, security, resources, and deployment automation. Finally, identifying business risks and risk tolerance involves mitigating risks through compliance and government policies.

Management is another major component of this final governing step. In utilizing the cloud adoption framework for management, workloads are classified by their impact and cost. Cloud adoption teams should work with other teams to create cloud environments that contain tools for operation and resilient solutions. Successful implementations will leverage monitoring, management (analyzing dependencies and identifying critical business operations), and resilience.

Synopsys is the industry’s largest provider of electronic design automation (EDA) technology used in the design and verification of semiconductor devices, or chips. With Synopsys Cloud, we’re taking EDA to new heights, combining the availability of advanced compute and storage infrastructure with unlimited access to EDA software licenses on-demand so you can focus on what you do best – designing chips, faster. Delivering cloud-native EDA tools and pre-optimized hardware platforms, an extremely flexible business model, and a modern customer experience, Synopsys has reimagined the future of chip design on the cloud, without disrupting proven workflows.

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