Is the EDA industry ready for cloud computing?

Many industries are increasingly adopting cloud computing. There are several electronic design automation (EDA) industry players, large and small companies, who have explored the idea of providing cloud-based very large-scale integration design tools and services. This paper briefly explores the history of EDA solutions and their growth path thus far, starting with standalone computer aided design (CAD) tools, through specialized EDA workstations, to integrated suites of tools and flows as currently provided by EDA vendors. A representative EDA flow and its steps are described to provide a basis for relating individual EDA tools to appropriate workload categories. Each step in the EDA design flow is then mapped to a cloud computing workload category. This mapping provides a basis for a decision on moving particular EDA design flow steps to a cloud computing environment. This paper also lists some capabilities currently offered by the public and private cloud providers as a basis for looking at the challenges and opportunities for migrating EDA solutions to cloud computing.