Design Flow Optimizer for EDA environments

Three steps to R&D optimization.

WHAT WE DO

On-demand optimization of Electronic Design Automation

Itility Design Flow Optimizer (DFO) software helps R&D teams balance cost and speed of EDA workloads, such as Synopsis or Cadence simulations and tape-outs.

Design simulations use expensive EDA tools and require large amounts of computing power. With DFO, R&D teams can run “what-if” scenarios and implement the optimal balance between speed and cost, on demand. DFO automatically configures their scheduler accordingly:

Accelerated Release, for projects with a critical time-to-market deadline, securing priority for tape-outs and expedited simulations.

Cost Optimization, for projects that can wait a bit longer for results, making use of available on-premises or low-cost cloud resources (e.g. spot instances) to minimize expenses.

After implementing DFO, our customers experience significant improvements in R&D productivity and a less complex planning process. While saving on costs. In essence, our solution provides the power to accelerate innovation, reduce costs, and increase competitiveness. With the Design Flow Optimizer, we:

Reduce R&D project run rate up to 40% by eliminating idle resources.
Significantly reduce engineering idle time
Accelerate design and verification cycles
Achieve up to 80% utilization of compute resources and EDA licenses
Gain complete visibility into R&D costs and time-to-market

HOW WE DO IT

Balancing cost and time-to-market

With simulation costs up to 15% of total product revenue, high-tech R&D departments must continuously balance costs with time-to-market failure rates.

Design simulations use expensive EDA tools and require large amounts of computing power. Cloud solutions offer scalability and fast simulations but can lead to a significant and potentially uncontrolled increase in cost of design flows. The challenge is optimizing speed and costs.

Itility DFO supports R&D managers with their daily challenge to prioritize projects, reduce monthly project run rates and increase R&D productivity. Our software solution offers an intuitive natural language interface, forward-looking observability, and automated scheduling, considering the desired cost & time-to-market balance.

Four aspects of R&D optimization

Optimizing R&D workloads requires focus on four areas to ensure R&D projects achieve the best balance between project priority, cost, and performance.

Matching simulation requirements with fit-for-purpose resources
Pricing model selection, considering on-premises infra, and on-demand, spot and reserved cloud resources
Intelligent Scheduling, selecting ideal time slots and scheduling simulation jobs
Cloud resource right-sizing, to adjust cloud resources and prevent overspend

R&D optimization approach

Project planning with Gen AI assistant

Instant insights into project demand for speed vs cost optimization.

Unified platform integration

Seamless combination of resource types into one flexible design platform.

Automated optimization

Test “what-if” scenarios and implement automatically.

Our first step is to assess R&D projects, to understand the specific situation and desired outcome. Most of our customers firstly need better, more up-to-date insight into project demand and time-to-market versus cost requirements. Which is why we start with understanding and improving insights.

We then seamlessly merge on-premises infrastructure and cloud resources into a flexible R&D design platform in which EDA workloads can be dynamically scheduled using DFO.

With up-to-date insights and versatile capabilities in place, it is time to automate optimization. Our software analyzes and predicts project demand, actual consumption, costs, and simulation waiting times, and offers R&D teams the insights needed for intelligent resource allocation.

An optional GenAI assistant offers natural language interaction, to set simulation specifics. Subsequently, advanced optimization algorithms and a dynamic cost calculator translate these specifics into DFO which then automatically configures the desired settings.

Implementation and support

During implementation we work closely with R&D and IT teams to configure and finetune the data collection and integration. We provide full support to ensure DFO is deployed and integrated into daily operations of an EDA environment.

Itility DFO comes with Basic support, which is enough for most situations. It includes the ability to report security or feature bugs and request additional features or consultancy.