Does Ic Design Have A Future In The Clouds?

Cloud computing is used to describe a collection of (remote) data centers (the hardware and the software) and applications delivered from them as a service (SaaS, Software as a Service). Its success is driven by the cost-effective on-demand availability of large, scalable amounts of computing resources. The cloud has become an established paradigm for many enterprise and consumer applications such as email, web servers, productivity applications, customer relationship management, etc. However, in IC design its success is still limited."Generic" cloud computing, as opposed to dedicated in house data centers running owned or leased software, and the EDA industry need to address the specific needs of IC design to conquer this market. Some of the key issues include:Security: Safeguarding of large amounts design dataScaling: Broad availability of not only many but also very large servers with large amounts of memory, storage and data transfer bandwidthAlgorithms: Algorithms and flows that scale well for a large number of servers with uncertain latency and increased failure ratesBusiness models: EDA leases tools for years while the predominant business model on the cloud is SaaS and payas-you-goTechnical issues: Other issues include error recovery, availability, performance unpredictability, lock in, etc.This panel will discuss the real and perceived hurdles that currently prevent a broad adoption of cloud computing in IC design, and several scenarios on how this could happen.