Transformation of a Hardware Electronic Design Automation (EDA) Solution to a SaaS

In the hardware and semiconductor industries, engineers routinely use electronic design automation (EDA) software tools to accelerate the large amount of work required to release highly-integrated hardware products. Many traditional EDA solutions are deployed as computer- or server-installed software, used via the command line and/or GUI. By contrast, many of today's modern software applications are released as software-as-a-service (SaaS) solution offerings in the cloud, accessed by a lightweight web application or browser. We have been working with the OpenROAD project out of the UCSD VLSI CAD Laboratory to transform their installed software into a cloud SaaS solution.

What is unique about EDA software?

• They are normally computationally intensive thanks to the under-the-hood algorithms that provide a great deal of value to the engineers using them.
• There are no monolithic EDA applications; instead, they exist as separate installed tools, each supporting a specific set of engineering activities.
• Commercial EDA tools are traditionally sold and managed via licenses which govern overall feature availability.
• They are used on large screen devices, such as laptops, desktops, and workstations.

Big architectural decisions affect everything

When transforming any installed application to a SaaS, it is not a matter of rewriting some code; the changes are foundational at the architectural level. The previous software implementation will be effectively split apart into services accessed via APIs. The solution's infrastructure will transition from customer-hosted to vendor-managed on slices of rented hardware.

Security tolerance and tenancy

Hardware companies treat their designs as highly-guarded intellectual property (IP). One key SaaS decision point is how data and resources are separated via single-tenanted or multi-tenanted architecture.

Cloud support

Depending upon the customer's existing business relationships, providing flexibility to choose commercial cloud providers can be a deciding factor. Certain customers may have contractual restrictions that prohibit use of public clouds.

Scaling and leveraging containers

One primary advantage of the cloud is the ability to scale compute, data, and other types of storage resources on demand. For OpenROAD SaaS, the application is segmented into various pieces, each which can scale independently via deployed containers.

Licensing, Features, and Roles

Company-wide, site-wide or individual user licensing schemes are often employed by traditional EDA software, and must be rethought with a SaaS migration. Collections of features can be packaged together in bundles and sold in tiered levels. Additionally, most SaaS solutions support different types of users, distinguished by their roles.

Rethinking target devices

Traditional EDA software is used via laptops, desktops, or workstations. However, in the cloud world we can envision use cases where engineers can make use of a tablet or mobile, such as checking on lengthy design job status.

Wrap-up

Our work with OpenROAD on the transformation of an installed EDA application to a SaaS solution highlights the complexity that must be managed under the hood while presenting a usable, simplified customer experience. Decisions about SaaS architecture, user roles, and target devices are foundational and necessary during any installed software to SaaS transformation process.