Semiconductor chip companies often operate on-premises data centers across various locations, but these facilities typically function in isolation. This siloed approach prevents them from leveraging compute and storage resources from other data centers or the cloud. The primary challenge lies in managing petabytes of data; transferring and synchronizing such vast amounts is inefficient. As a result, the semiconductor and electronic design automation (EDA) industries have been slow to adopt cloud solutions that offer the latest hardware and elasticity.

Spillbox technology addresses these limitations by providing instant visibility into the entire dataset and low-latency access to on-premises data from remote compute instances. This allows design and verification engineers to concentrate on their core responsibilities without the distraction of data availability concerns.

Even within a single data center or cloud environment, the overhead associated with accessing data and metadata for NFS-based EDA workloads can significantly impact cost and performance. By reducing the time required for simulations or regressions within existing data centers, companies can lower costs for ASIC customers and achieve faster turnaround times. The Spillbox filesystem introduces a new paradigm that enhances performance, ultimately reducing EDA tool costs whether within a single data center, across multiple sites, or in the cloud.

In chip verification, millions of tests are run, involving billions of simulation cycles, necessitating substantial compute power. These tests are supported by terabyte-scale file systems and complex data dependencies, making the workloads metadata-intensive and requiring high concurrency and performance from storage solutions. Spillbox technology not only extends compute resources to the cloud and remote data centers but also accelerates these demanding workloads. As design sizes increase, engineers gain the flexibility to utilize the latest cloud hardware automatically.

Backend physical design workloads involve processing exceptionally large files and significant amount of memory. Any improvement in storage efficiency or processing speed using cutting-edge CPUs can lead to faster turnaround times and cost reductions for ASIC customers, foundries, and EDA vendors. Furthermore, as advanced nodes proliferate, the need for additional compute resources becomes critical. Spillbox technology enhances performance and seamlessly enables designers to execute the same commands while tapping into additional compute resources available in the cloud or remote data centers.