Synopsys Cloud: The Power of Automated License Management

By _Synopsys Blog

November 16, 2023

In today’s semiconductor landscape, time to market is everything. In the pursuit of meeting tight schedules, chip design houses constantly seek the right engineering expertise, EDA solutions, IP, and compute resources to optimize their workflows, boost engineering productivity, and streamline operations. A key aspect of running EDA workloads efficiently is acquiring/managing EDA licenses and maintaining license servers. In this blog, we’ll focus on this very crucial aspect.

The Burden of EDA Software License Management

We have learned from our customers that EDA tool license management is not trivial. It diverts valuable energy away from the core engineering task of designing chips and is a significant cost for our customers, as the process demands time, resources, and expertise.

Software license management entails a variety of tasks. It involves acquiring and installing license keys, keeping license servers running 24*7 to ensure there is no loss of the design team's productivity, and managing license expirations. Keeping license servers running 24*7 can be quite a challenge when new license keys are added. Users may suffer downtime as the server needs to be stopped and restarted to read in the new license file. Moreover, these servers need to scale up to cater to additional license demand to fulfill peak needs, say during tape-outs. This entails acquiring licenses and the addition of more servers, which is a manual process that incurs a heavy cost of lost time, management overhead, and additional server infrastructure.

A solution that can automate the overhead reliably could significantly improve engineering productivity.

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