Many hardware designers whom we spoke with, including investors, students, engineers, regardless of whether they work with ASICs or FPGAs, associate cloud computing with utility or cheap computing power. Instead of spending half a million dollars on servers, networking equipment and maintenance, one can simply use a "rental cloud".
While the benefits are commonly touted, in the digital hardware world, certain attributes like convenience, on-demand scalability and parallel execution of design tasks really come into the fore.
For example, instead of designing, synthesizing, placing and routing a single design with a single set of parameters or constraints, let's try the three most probable design configurations at the same time. Once the compute-intensive tasks are complete, your compute resources can be relinquished to save on maintenance time and effort, and re-acquired when the need arises.
For example, instead of designing, synthesizing, placing and routing a single design with a single set of parameters or constraints, let's try the three most probable design configurations at the same time. Once the compute-intensive tasks are complete, your compute resources can be relinquished to save on maintenance time and effort, and re-acquired when the need arises.