We’ve decided to start a corporate blog at PDTi.  This inaugural posting is about something that’s near and dear to our hearts – using Software as a Service (SaaS) web applications for solving chip-development register automation needs. The most compelling benefits in using a SaaS business model for EDA include:

  • Simplified use, support and maintenance
  • Lower cost structure
  • Expanded collaboration

By register automation, I’m referring to a class of tools that takes in addressable register specifications for defining the hardware interface.  This is the hardware interface that gets read and written by software.  This type of register interface goes by many different names.

Simplified use, support, and maintenance benefits come from the fact that the SaaS user can run the tool using a web-browser.  Users simply point their trusty browser to a URL, and login.  The tool vendor has complete control of the server hardware and software.  The vendor can add enhancements and fixes seamlessly, saving the end user a lot of work.

One obvious constraint with the SaaS model is data transfer requirements.  For the front-end of chip design, file sizes are not such a big issue since plain text VHDL, Verilog, SystemVerilog, and C/C++ files are relatively small.  For transferring larger files, like back-end physical design databases, the average HTTPS client/server connection may not be ideal.

Another factor that always comes up with SaaS is security.  One benefit with web-applications is that a lot of big enterprises have put a lot of money and time into how to secure web servers, and there is a lot of common knowledge in this area.  An enormous number of transactions per day occur securely over HTTPS around the world.

Intense vendor specialization and economies of scale provide the benefit of a lower cost structure.  Vendors know how to best develop, run, and maintain the tools they build.  With the vendor actively maintaining the tool, the cost structure can be lower for all parties.  Sharing the server-side compute resources among many users maximizes utility, reducing the compute nodes per user/project/company.  This also reduces the environmental costs of having un-utilized servers running.

The need for better collaboration in the chip-dev supply-chain is growing and SaaS helps to expand collaboration.   More companies are buying IP, selling IP, outsourcing work, using open-source projects, and in general collaborating with customers, partners, and suppliers.  The client/server architecture of web applications makes it possible to formalize this collaboration and make it consistently repeatable.

We have no doubts that register design automation is well suited for a SaaS business model.  In future postings we’ll examine what other types of existing and future EDA tools align with the SaaS model. If you have any thoughts on this leave a comment and let us know what you think.