Streamline Chip Design and Delivery to Minimize EDA Costs

Chipmakers have been continually evolving  higher complexity chip designs 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 their schematics increase, the design for test (DFT) and verification process gets more complicated and time-consuming. This means semiconductor manufacturers need a fast storage platform that supports high capacity, and is highly concurrent at scale. Common data storage challenges of powering evolving EDA workloads include:

• Data silos required for legacy storage make it difficult for design engineers and integrated EDA workflows to access, share, protect, and manage data during chip design lifecycle. 
• Mid-size to large semiconductor design environments have the ability to overrun any storage platform for EDA workflows. 
• Legacy storage’s insistence on over-provisioning storage to mitigate scale complexity incurs high infrastructure costs. Unlike all-flash storage systems, file systems based on traditional disk (spinning or mainstream solid state drives) technologies provide limited predictability and scale-out performance needed during simulation and verification phases that directly impact overall tapeout timelines.

The Pure Storage platform  boasts a number of hardware and software features that make data storage simple, scalable, and transformational.

Platform highlights 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 from Evergreen//One™ for AI allows business owners to optimise operational costs and onboard active and new design projects quickly.
• True scale-out and predictable performance with FlashBlade//S enables faster job turnaround times, thus completing chip design and tape out phases than ones supported by legacy storage.
• Pure1® AI-powered storage analytics identifies potential issues before they occur and recommends solutions for preventing them.
• Consolidated file and object storage to power the most demanding EDA workloads, including software development cycles.

FlashBlade//S is a unified fast file and object platform that scales out non-disruptively to meet your  ever-increasing storage needs. It 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 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 collapsing data storage silos that have traditionally supported diverse semiconductor design and tape-out workflows with network-attached storage (NAS) and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices with a single scale-out storage solution that delivers multidimensional performance at scale.