I used to live on the Cote d'Azur, which is what everyone else calls the French Riviera. The name comes from the blue color of the Mediterranean Sea, azur in French. In English, it is azure. But it is probably more well-known today as the name of Microsoft's Cloud business. Ironically, the dictionary definition of the color azure is " bright blue in color, like a cloudless sky." At last week's TSMC OIP Ecosystem Forum, the invited keynote was by Kushagra Vaid of Microsoft titled Modernizing Silicon Development Using the Cloud . He also gave the invited keynote at CDNLive Silicon Valley in 2017. See my post Microsoft CDNLive Keynote: Cloudy with a Chance of Chips for what he said then. He is GM for Azure Infrastructure for Cloud+AI. Perhaps more importantly for this audience is that he spent a dozen years as a chip designer at Intel. As he said at the CDNLive keynote "I've used plenty of Cadence tools." At OIP there is a strict no photography rule, so the picture of Kushagra was from last year. I'd like to use some of his slides too...but TSMC mean it with its no photography rule and in the past have banned journalists who violated it. Last year, Kushagra said that Azure had over 100 datacenters in 140 countries. He had the statistics for this year: 54 Azure regions in 140 countries 2 million miles of intra-datacenter fiber Millions of servers Billions in annual spending A Trillion Units Something that I didn't know, but probably should have, is that semiconductor units are forecast to pass 1 trillion units for the first time in 2018 (IC Insights' numbers and graph). I'm not sure how useful a measure "units" are of the industry, but a trillion of anything is a lot. Of course, in the industry, we are more concerned about future growth, and which parts of the industry that will come from. Kushagra pointed out that "we can't grow the market unless we bring in new developers." I think that is only partially true, we can improve the productivity of the engineers already in the industry, but there is certainly a competition for talent between semiconductor and other industries that are superficially sexier (like social media), and even within semiconductor between major regions like US, China, Japan, and Europe. There is a shortage of talent everywhere. Transistor densities are increasing. If we start from 40nm as 1, then 28nm is 2.7, 16nm is 4.8, 10nm is 9.2, and 7nm is 16.8. That's 17 times higher density over that period. But in addition to wanting more designers, the ones already in the industry need significant computer and storage. Today it costs $150M to build a chip, and at 5nm and beyond the forecasts are more like 1/4 billion dollars. A design today requires 150TB of storage, and the performance required to access that storage is also growing. Similar trends are in any graph you see about CPU requirements. We need to figure out how to scale the infrastructure to match the growth in transistors. Perhaps more importantly, companies for years (decades even) have been encouraged to focus on what they actually sell. Semiconductor and system companies core business is not building datacenters, and that can now be completely outsourced to cloud providers who have global scale and can do a better job. They also want to focus their R&D spending on their products. Moving to the Cloud Security is something at the top of many customers' minds. They have assets and want to understand security. Microsoft spends over $1B on security each year, ranging from physical stuff like cameras and fences, up to securing networks and virtual machines. As Kushagra put it: Customers soon realize that they can't keep up and do as good a job as the cloud provider. The way people usually starts is known as "lift and shift." Take what you have on-prem and move it to the cloud. Of course, this is often done in a hybrid manner, with some of the workload running on-prem and some in the cloud, but with the same tools and flows. The bigger gain comes when you start to consider stuff you can only do in the cloud: use millions of cores, or failover, or global redundancy. This is called "cloud native." Kushagra discussed the silicon development stack, which is shown in the diagram to the right. At the bottom is Azure, providing the hardware and operating system infrastructure. Next up is TSMC with the PDKs, tool settings, foundation IP. Then Cadence for EDA tools and IP, finally at the top is the customer design. Kushagra had a video about the TSMC OIP alliance with Azure. It featured Lip-Bu Tan for Cadence. Unfortunately, it doesn't seem to be online anywhere I can find. Transforming the Future The cloud offers new opportunities. Kushagra listed them out: Born-in-the-cloud EDA flows and home-garage-based silicon developers, increased VC investments to drive semi industry growth, transforming silicon design flows using the power of the cloud to speed machine learning. These three will transform design into the future. If you want to try this out, then you can start for free at azure.com/tsmc . “Anyone can try it out anywhere, no matter where you are in the world, and you don’t have to set up any infrastructure.” Or read the white paper. Sign up for Sunday Brunch, the weekly Breakfast Bytes email.![]()
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