The Growing Tide: Hardware Design in the Cloud

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The Growing Tide: Hardware Design in the Cloud

We feel like surfers in an hitherto undiscovered surfing paradise, believing that the big waves(FPGA Design in the Cloud) will come and working hard in preparation (developing Plunify's platform) for them. When the waves come, we just have to time it right, paddle like crazy and stay in the sweet spot.
But we have to create conditions for the waves to come as well.

Our success depends on it.

Luckily since we started working on Plunify, we could feel the waves coming, and they might well form a tsunami.

News from the recent 47th Design Automation Conference(DAC): Even the EDA world is looking to the cloud for solutions

The cloud is not new, of course. It's merely a more mature form of the server farms of yore.

What's different is how companies, especially startups like us, are springing up to provide applications as services.

A few main obstacles to user adoption have been identified; here they are (Source: EETimes) and here's how we are solving these issues for the FPGA world:

  • Will the design be stored locally or at the vendor's site?

    Trust involves both human and technical factors. On the technical side, we encrypt transmissions and set strict user permissions on data stored on our servers. We even delete source files after we're done processing.

    But that's not enough, is it?

    We let clients store source files locally on their PCs, and just access the tools remotely. Speed and scalability are tradeoffs in that case, but IP security is assured.

  • How does the application handle authorized--and unauthorized--access to the design?

    Protection occurs at several levels: the OS, the filesystem and at the web frontend, in the form of passwords, SSH and SSL authentication.

    A friend who works in the military doing IT security is coming over to hack into our system. We shudder at the holes he is going to uncover, but are looking forward to patching them up!

  • How often will tools be updated, and will users receive enough advance notice?

    This is an issue that bugs many FPGA designs--namely the tool version changes and a working design breaks.

    We keep all supported versions available and track which designs work on which tool versions, so users should never get into that situation with Plunify.

  • Does the hosting provider have enough bandwidth to support very large files?

    Bandwidth was part of the reason why we use Amazon AWS as our cloud provider.

    To be honest, we haven't really felt any bandwidth pressure yet. The system seems to be handling itself quite nicely.

Things are slightly different between FPGA and IC design, even though processes are similar.

It is great to hear that the industry is responding favorably to what we're doing. But the proof of the pudding still lies in the eating--how users feel about our solutions to the problems above. Or will we uncover new user concerns?

That's part of the fun, and the challenges.

OK, back to work.

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