Accelerate Chip Design and Delivery to Minimize EDA Costs

Chipmakers have been cramming higher complexity into smaller form factors for decades, in a bid to remain competitive and keep pace with Moore’s Law. But as feature capabilities and systemic complexities in the silicon increase, the design for test (DFT) and verification process gets more complicated and time consuming. Semiconductor manufacturers need a storage platform that is fast, high capacity, and highly concurrent at scale. Common data storage challenges of powering EDA workloads include:

• Data silos make it difficult for design engineers and integrated EDA workflows to access, share, protect, and manage data during chip design lifecycle.
• Mid to large semiconductor design environments have the ability to over run any storage platform for EDA workflows.
• Over provisioning storage to mitigate scale complexity ends up incurring high infrastructure costs. Unlike all-flash storage systems, file systems based on traditional disk (spinning or solid state) technologies provide limited predictability and scale out performance needed during simulation and verification phases thus impacting the overall tapeout timelines.

Pure Storage all-flash solutions boast a number of hardware and software features that make data storage simple, seamless, and sustainable.

These features include: 

• Modular all-flash storage architecture allows chip design projects to size and grow performance and capacity needs as workloads scale. No storage over provisioning is required.
• A flexible consumption model like Evergreen//One™ allows business owners to optimize operational costs and onboard active and new design projects quickly.
• True scale out and predictable performance on FlashBlade//S enables faster job turnaround times thus completing the chip design and tape out phases quickly.
• AI-powered analytics identifies issues before they occur and recommend solutions for preventing them with Pure1 Meta®.
• Consolidated file and object storage to  power your most demanding EDA workloads, including software development cycles.
• The economics and scalability of FlashBlade//E provides an alternative to disk for long-term retention and repository workloads with the benefits of all-flash performance.

FlashBlade//S is a unified fast file and object platform that scales out non-disruptively with your storage needs. FlashBlade is designed to meet the high-concurrency requirements of semiconductor and EDA workloads, including software builds, RTL simulations, synthesis, and tape out regressions. It combines file and object storage protocols with the low latency, massive parallelism, and high throughput capabilities of enterprise all-flash storage.

FlashBlade//S consolidates two traditionally separate storage paradigms—file and object storage—into one performant data platform. It enables you to replace data silos from diverse semiconductor design and tape out workflows, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices with a single scale-out storage solution that delivers multidimensional performance at scale.