Workstation for ASIC design

Hi,

I'm a PhD student working at a university and we wish to set up a designated ASIC design workstation in our lab. We're kinda new to this stuff, but we've been playing around with
the Mentor Graphics IC Flow/ADK etc, which we have access to. We have been writing VHDL and simulating it for quite a while. Now we wish to do a full ASIC flow for our code.

We wish to spec out a workstation that would be optimal for this kinda of work (HDL simulation and synthesis for ASICs, and possibly FPGAs aswell). I've looked through the Mentor Graphics documentation and also online, but they don't seem to give any "recommended requirements", or even minimum requirements in a lot of cases. They simply seem to give the supported OS and processor architectures in the documents.

I've also looked around online and found a few companies that do workstations, such as Lenovo, but I can't be sure if they are optimal for our purpose. At the moment, we're thinking that basically what we need is the fastest processor and largest amount of fast RAM we can afford, with things like the GPU and hard disk not being so important.
Would number of processor cores be important, as I'm not sure if many of these tools are parallelized? Even if people can give some opinions on this general approach that would be great. Maybe there are companies catering specifically for IC design workstations aswell?

Although we've been using the Mentor Graphics tools, we may have an opportunity to switch to Synopsys, which many people say is the leading tool for ASIC synthesis. I would imagine that wouldn't really change much though with regard to hardware requirements.

Any help at all would be appreciated.

mjyke

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Sorry, just to clarify a bit more, when I say "optimal" I mean mostly what kind of spec would give the highest performance, (e.g. shortest synthesis and simulation times, ability to handle large synthesis and simulation runs, smooth user interaction).

Thanks,

mjyke

mike412 said:

Hi,

I'm a PhD student working at a university and we wish to set up a designated ASIC design workstation in our lab. We're kinda new to this stuff, but we've been playing around with
the Mentor Graphics IC Flow/ADK etc, which we have access to. We have been writing VHDL and simulating it for quite a while. Now we wish to do a full ASIC flow for our code.

We wish to spec out a workstation that would be optimal for this kinda of work (HDL simulation and synthesis for ASICs, and possibly FPGAs aswell). I've looked through the Mentor Graphics documentation and also online, but they don't seem to give any "recommended requirements", or even minimum requirements in a lot of cases. They simply seem to give the supported OS and processor architectures in the documents.

I've also looked around online and found a few companies that do workstations, such as Lenovo, but I can't be sure if they are optimal for our purpose. At the moment, we're thinking that basically what we need is the fastest processor and largest amount of fast RAM we can afford, with things like the GPU and hard disk not being so important.
Would number of processor cores be important, as I'm not sure if many of these tools are parallelized? Even if people can give some opinions on this general approach that would be great. Maybe there are companies catering specifically for IC design workstations aswell?

Although we've been using the Mentor Graphics tools, we may have an opportunity to switch to Synopsys, which many people say is the leading tool for ASIC synthesis. I would imagine that wouldn't really change much though with regard to hardware requirements.

Any help at all would be appreciated.

mjyke

Click to expand...

To me, I would go for workstations with high number of cores (multicore) and large RAM capacity. In order to be able to use multicore features for the EDA tools, you need multiple licenses which I believe for one license for each core. Thus eventually, it will come to a cost factor. If you have high budget, then go for the most advanced machine, it will save you much time.

Thanks.

I am actually considering augmenting my workstation with the "cloud". You can rent cpu cycles from amazon.com for about 9 cents an hour and run all your jobs in parallel. Then all you need on your desk is something for editing and waveform viewing.


Has anyone done this? How hard is it?

I am actually considering augmenting my workstation with the "cloud". You can rent cpu cycles from amazon.com for about 9 cents an hour and run all your jobs in parallel.

Click to expand...

Other than the question of "how hard is it to implement it", what would be the benefit of using it in terms of tools run-time compared with the advanced workstation (to me for a designer, one of the concern is run-time)?

Thanks.

soloktanjung said:

Other than the question of "how hard is it to implement it", what would be the benefit of using it in terms of tools run-time compared with the advanced workstation (to me for a designer, one of the concern is run-time)?

Thanks.

Click to expand...

Asic design usually involves running many tool flows that do not depend on any other flows. If you have 100 simulations ranging from 5 minutes to 1/2 hour then you can run them all on the cloud in 1/2 hour instead of all day on a single workstation. If your turnaround time for your validation suite is low then you can re-validate after any small change and failures are easier to debug. If your turnaround time is long then you tend to re-validate only after several changes and failures are harder to debug.

A cloud can also give you a variety of choices for cpu/memory instances. You can run most of your stuff on the basic image and save the expensive images for your big jobs. When you buy a workstation you have to size it for the biggest job that you expect to ever run.