IBM renting out EDA tools

Online access is half the price of licensing.

By moving its electronic design automation suite of chip-designing tools to the cloud, IBM can now share the famous proprietary EDA tools with chip designers at what the company claims is half the price of licensing tools from competitors. Using its own SoftLayer cloud infrastructure to store the tools securely, the company is now offering a toolkit through the portal of SiCAD Inc., a silicon design platform provider of cloud-based EDA design flows.

"We are targeting small and midsize businesses, with a factor of two in price/performance compared to other tool vendors," Christopher Porter, IBM high-performance computing (HPC) manager told EE Times. "We now offer a pay-as-you-go business model instead of a three-to-five year license agreement like the other EDA vendors."

The tools are rented out per day, per application, per core — a price that will halve the cost of developing a new IC, according to IBM. However, the company is not offering the complete design flow — even internally it has to use third-party tools to finish a design — but presenting what it says is 70 to 90 percent. This includes the Library Characterization Tool (for synthesis, sign-off timers and power analysis that it claims doubles performance over competitors), the Logic Verification tool (that verifies and debugs VHDL and Verilog designs 10 times faster than competitors' tools, it claims), along with its own Spice simulator.

IBM expects its tools to be used by enterprise-class organizations to design SoCs for mobile phones, and wearable and Internet-of-Things devices conceived by small and midsize businesses who will appreciate the cost savings of cloud-based EDA design flows.

To read the rest of the article, please go to EETimes.

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