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Sun Compute Farms for Electronic DesignCompany: Mentor Graphics Corp. Electronic design teams today perform under both technological and market pressures. Short product windows are driving time-to-market and initial quality -— first pass design success is now essential for effective products. At the same time, competition, user demands, and sophisticated design tools have escalated the complexity of processors and other components. Designs requiring tens of millions of transistors are not uncommon, implying mammoth testing and simulation resources. Finally, the technology-driven economy and tight job market have placed valuable electronic design talent at a premium. Productivity in electronic design has never been more important. Network-centric compute farms have emerged as an effective method to address these issues and boost productivity for design teams. As a market leader in systems for Electronic Design Automation (EDA) and an aggressive user of EDA technology, Sun Microsystems, Inc. has pioneered the compute farm concept using its own UltraSPARCä systems in design centers around the world. These experiences along with those of other firms have shown that well designed Sun compute farms provide an effective and scalable computational resource that enables true collaborative global engineering. This document provides a brief introduction to compute farm technology and explores the application of Sun compute farms in electronic design centers at Nippon Electronic Corporation (NEC), Advanced Micro Devices (AMD), and Sun Microsystems. Information on the Sunä Technical Compute Farm (Sun TCF) product is also provided (chapter 3). Additional information on Sun compute farms can be found in the white papers listed in the references section. | |
Reprinted from SOCcentral.com, your first stop for ASIC, FPGA, EDA, and IP news and design information. | |