The blogs have been buzzing about EDA SaaS ("Electronic Design Automation Software as a Service"). In one of my previous posts on the subject, I argued that the complexity of system design is growing faster than the ability of a reasonable desktop computer and that this will create demand for hosted EDA tools. I also argued that the ease of rolling out new features and upgrading users to the latest version is a major selling point for EDA SaaS. My experience this past week produced anecdotal evidence of both these points.
I'm coming to the final stages of a PDP-11/70 emulator design where I have it running test software in simulation. I was running Xilinx ISE 10.1 and about an hour and a half into the synthesis, I got an out of memory error from XST:
ERROR:Portability:3 - This Xilinx application has run out of memory or has encountered a memory conflict. Current memory usage is 2090436 kb. You can try increasing your system's physical or virtual memory. For technical support on this issue, please open a WebCase with this project attached at http://www.xilinx.com/support.I searched for help on this error and I discovered from the Xilinx forums that you can add the /3GB option to your 32-bit Windows machine's boot.ini. A reboot and a couple hours later, I get the same message only with a larger number for the current memory usage at the time it failed. Before I start partitioning my design (something I'll have to do eventually anyway to increase my iteration rate during timing closure), I decide to give it a try on a 64-bit Vista machine. It compiles using some ungodly amount of memory after several hours.
Process "Synthesis" failed
I decided that I should install Xilinx ISE 11.1 on the 32-bit machine and give it a try. After an hour-long installation I have 11.1 running, and after another hour downloading an automatic update to 11.2 I'm ready to go. Running 11.2, the 32-bit machine compiles my design within the 3 GB memory limit.
These problems don't exist in a future world where EDA tools are provided as a service. If synthesis tools were hosted on some humongous supercomputer then I don't have to run out of memory and I don't have to install any software updates. Since you can run the synthesis optimizations and place-and-route parallelized across a thousand cores, I can even get my results in less than a couple hours.
Anyone want to do this?
---------
Edit 7/24
Another benefit of hosted EDA tools is that errors can be reported directly to the software vendor. This means that your hosted software won't have dozens of users experiencing the same error and not telling anyone.
I started partitioning my design today, and got a wonderfully meaningless error:
INTERNAL_ERROR:Xst:cmain.c:3446:1.47.6.1 - To resolve this error, please consult the Answers Database and other online resources at http://support.xilinx.com
Obviously Xilinx doesn't provide cmain.c as open source so I can't really figure out what I'm upsetting in the source code. Googling reveals that the Xilinx Forums have nothing useful to say about this bug, but I discovered that I am not alone with this error on the blog of another Israeli with similar gripes with ISE.
There are thousands of business opportunities that can be created by appending "...that doesn't suck" to the description of an existing product.
