Intel foundry services forms alliance to enable design in the cloud

Intel Foundry Services (IFS) launched the next phase of its Accelerator ecosystem program. The IFS Cloud Alliance will enable secure design environments in the cloud, improving foundry customer design efficiency and accelerating time-to-market by harnessing the power of massive on-demand compute. Initial members of the program include leading cloud providers Amazon Web Services and Microsoft Azure, as well as the key players in electronic design automation (EDA).

Randhir Thakur, president of Intel Foundry Services
“By leveraging the scalability of cloud-based design environments, the IFS Cloud Alliance will enable broader access to Intel’s advanced process and packaging technologies. Our partnerships with leading cloud providers and EDA tool suppliers will provide a flexible and secure platform where customers can scale compute requirements instantly on production-proven design environments in the cloud.”

Chip design is an incredibly complex process, requiring powerful software and hardware tools to create the intricate patterns that make up the layout of an integrated circuit. The software has traditionally been run on servers in on-premise data centers, where companies could ensure control over the security and confidentiality of their valuable product designs. While well-established fabless chip designers may have the resources to invest in these capabilities, they can present a significant barrier to entry for many startups and other firms that do not have large-scale in-house design teams.

Enabling solutions in the cloud provides greater access to advanced manufacturing technologies, offering a new path for customers to bring their innovations to life. Cloud-based design combines EDA tool scalability with the unmatched parallelism offered by the cloud, supporting critical design workloads that can benefit a wide variety of customers, from startups to companies with established on-premise compute farms. New advances in EDA tools and cloud technologies can deliver security and IP confidentiality, while simultaneously shortening design cycles and accelerating time-to-market for designers.

Through the Cloud Alliance, IFS will collaborate with partners to ensure that EDA tools are optimized to take advantage of the scalability of the cloud while meeting the requirements of Intel’s process design kits (PDKs). This will provide customers a secure and scalable path to adopt their preferred EDA tools and flows in the cloud environment, through partnerships with leading EDA providers Ansys, Cadence, Siemens EDA and Synopsys. The result will be on-demand hardware on a foundry platform, allowing designers to tackle larger workloads with better resource management, time-to-market and result quality.

CT Bureau