Semiconductor and silicon technology are the basis of digital transformation happening everywhere, across industries and our daily lives, impacting the way we work, learn, and play. The continuous improvement in the performance and power of silicon has been key to enabling this innovation. Here at Microsoft, we’ve empowered our long-standing partners in the semiconductor industry to embrace Azure’s cloud infrastructure and scale out electronic design automation (EDA). With a new EDA-optimized cloud environment running on Azure, the launch of Synopsys Cloud marks a significant milestone for the industry by offering silicon design teams the ability to scale and accelerate their development cycles—transforming chip design the way that the cloud transformed computing.

Increasing flexibility and efficiency in silicon development on Azure

The collective rise in time-to-market pressure caused by the global chip shortage and increasing computational demands have caused chipmakers to seek more flexibility and efficiency in the silicon design process. Migrating chip design to Azure’s optimized infrastructure helps address part of this equation by enabling critical design and verification workloads on the cloud—resulting in faster time-to-results and better quality at a lower cost. With Synopsys Cloud built on Azure, chip designers will now also have access to a new pay-per-use model offering automated provisioning of infrastructure and EDA tools to address the growing demands of silicon design.

This “pay-as-you-go” model is a software as a service (SaaS)-based approach that will reduce barriers for companies of all sizes while enabling greater innovation and value for customers and EDA vendors alike. Using the power of Azure’s workload scaling and virtual machine (VM) selection capabilities, Synopsys Cloud customers will be able to optimize critical EDA workloads—from reducing processing time on verification tasks to saving runtime and enabling faster design convergence on library characterization.

Expanding access to chip design on the cloud

Microsoft has long been committed to helping companies of all sizes unlock more potential on the cloud. With its powerful chip design and verification tools running on Azure’s trusted and comprehensive cloud platform, Synopsys is Microsoft’s preferred partner for EDA on the cloud. Using Synopsys’ solution, customers ranging from startups to large design enterprises benefit from simplified access to custom infrastructure for all their chip design needs—helping them build silicon and tackle designs they previously could not

Innovation for wide-ranging impact

From intelligent scaling of EDA resources to using AI and machine learning models to transform design and resource management, silicon manufacturing has already seen vast improvements with the introduction of the cloud. The shift towards cloud-centric silicon design has enabled newfound access to compute, storage, and tooling resources. Ultimately, improved time-to-results, quality-of-results, and cost-of-results are just the beginning of what cloud-enabled EDA enhancements can offer. As design on the cloud becomes increasingly widespread, I look forward to seeing the silicon industry continuing to innovate towards new levels of ingenuity—powered by the Microsoft Cloud.

Tune in to Synopsys’ SNUG 2022 conference to watch a keynote by Dr. Aart de Geus, Chairman and co-CEO of Synopsys, including a fireside chat with Satya Nadella, Chairman and CEO of Microsoft.

Learn more

• Learn more about Azure for the semiconductor industry.
• Learn more about Azure high-performance computing (HPC) for Silicon.
• Learn more about Azure Virtual Machines (VMs).
• Learn more about Microsoft’s global infrastructure.
• Take a virtual tour of Microsoft’s datacenters.