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The past decades have brought incredible growth and innovation in the semiconductor industry. Moore’s Law can take credit for much of this innovation. Moore’s Law predicts that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 2 years (mainly by making individual transistors smaller). EDA workflows, used to design semiconductor chips, have evolved to address the challenges of growing chip size and increased manufacturing complexity that has resulted. Requirements for compute (performance) and storage (total TBs) have also tracked with Moore’s Law – with CPU performance and storage requirements doubling every two years.
Eight years ago, however, the laws of physics made it more difficult to shrink individual transistors – slowing down the evolution. Engineers adapted by changing focus from growing CPU performance to increasing total core count per CPU. Engineers also increased transistor count per chip by making the chips much larger. Engineers continue to find new ways to shrink transistors as well, though more slowly. The net of all this is that Moore’s Law continues, but chip complexity is growing faster, which directly impacts infrastructure. Currently, CPU core requirements continue to double every 2 years. But storage requirements quadruple. This change has uncovered a new performance bottleneck – storage.
Unfortunately, existing storage technologies, while able to accommodate the acceleration in capacity requirements, they have done so at the expense of storage performance. This change has effectively shifted the EDA tool performance bottleneck – historically CPU performance – to storage performance. This problem can be traced to legacy scale-up storage architectures, which have dominated the semiconductor design market for decades, yet remained fundamentally unchanged.
Today market leading organizations are taking a holistic approach to IT infrastructure, looking for any opportunity to improve performance. Many are migrating to Dell PowerScale, which invented the scale-out storage architecture. They are also leveraging smarter job schedulers that can share resources more effectively. Design teams are looking to AI as a tool to give them a competitive advantage. Though most EDA flows are NFS driven, CAD and IT teams are looking to object storage to leverage the S3 access, geo replication, and distribution capabilities of Dell ECS storage as well. For Moore’s Law to remain alive in the new decade, organizations must innovate across the complete stack including CAD design flow, engineering infrastructure, and IT. With time-to-market requirements always a priority, the need for high performance, scalable, enterprise-class, and globally distributed design infrastructure is of utmost importance.