Siemens Makes Big CAE Play with EDA Acquisition and New Cloud Offering

Within the last few days, Siemens Digital Industries Software has made two interesting announcements that target its CAE users. The first was the launch of Simcenter Cloud HPC software and the second was the acquisition of Avery Design Systems for its electronic design automation (EDA) and integrated circuit (IC) verification technologies.

Let’s go over the news one by one.

VIP EDA Offering Coming to Siemens Xcelerator

With the EDA acquisition, Siemens plans to add Avery’s technology to the Siemens Xcelerator portfolio to support the IC and EDA verification tools already available. What sets Avery’s technology apart, according to the press release, is its simulation-independent verification IP (VIP) offerings.

"The verification and verification IP markets continue to undergo major paradigm shifts," said Joseph Sawicki, Executive Vice President, IC-EDA, Siemens Digital Industries Software. "Increasing SoC complexity, demand for new protocols and standards, and broadening use of verification IP use cases present customers with new challenges relating to the verification of sophisticated, next-generation IC designs. The acquisition of Avery further extends Siemens' leadership in the verification space, adding Avery's impressive Verification Protocol and Compliance Test Suite offerings, critical verification IP market understanding and know-how and eminent R&D talent. This can enhance Siemens' offerings across mainstream verification IP segments, while further extending Siemens verification solutions into areas such as high-performance computing (HPC), edge, networking and 3DICs."

Siemens is acquiring Avery Design Systems. (Image courtesy of Siemens.)

Chilai Huang, President and CEO of Avery Design Systems, added, "Customers need a complete protocol portfolio for their applications and verification IP available as soon as standards are released, as well as compliance testing solutions that can help reduce risk and help enhance the correctness of their protocols. The Avery offerings enable this, helping system and SoC design teams to achieve dramatic functional verification productivity improvements. Being part of Siemens also allows growth opportunities for the business, with the combination of Avery's products and Siemens' Questa verification IP offerings enabling continued support of verification engineers across the entire spectrum of simulation solutions."

The terms of the Avery Design System acquisition have not been disclosed. However, it is expected to be finalized in Q1 of the 2023 fiscal year.

Siemens Expands its On-demand Cloud HPC Offerings

As for the Simcenter Cloud HPC software, it aims to add scalable, on-demand high-performance simulation capabilities via Siemens Xcelerator as a Service (XaaS). This announcement expands the engineering software company’s relationship with Amazon Web Services (AWS). AWS will host the new service on systems that are optimized for Siemens solvers and technologies. The announcement also comes days after a similar one about Siemens Teamcenter and Google Cloud.

“Having access to sufficient HPC resources is essential to get the most value from engineering simulation and this issue is a constant challenge for engineering departments with evolving needs,” says Jean-Claude Ercolanelli, Senior Vice President, Simulation and Test Solutions, Siemens Digital Industries Software. “By providing flexible, accessible and scalable HPC resources in the cloud, we are offering our customers a new freedom to rapidly scale up or down as their business requires, avoiding locked capital and paying only for what is used.”

Siemens expands its cloud HPC offerings. (Image courtesy of Siemens.)

In other words, the aim of the service is to reduce the costs of on-premise HPC tools and to democratize the access to simulation for small-to-medium enterprises (SMEs). Simcenter Cloud HPC will be accessible in the desktop simulation tool without any additional configurations. Engineers gain instant access to expanded computational resources while avoiding the cost of third-party cloud services. Saving on those cloud and HPC costs is what makes this feature attractive to SMEs. However, larger organizations should still focus on this change, as it can be a means to meet tight deadlines by supplementing on-premise clusters without large capital expenditures (CapEx) or long term investments.

For instance, Larisa von Riewel, group leader of CAE at Heraeus Noblelight, a UV and IR photonics-based solutions company, said, “Models are becoming more accurate, and we need to capture more physical realism. You can guarantee that we will frequently require more powerful HPC resources in the future. Simcenter Cloud HPC offers that agility, which translates into a more competitive offering for our customers”

According to VentureBeat, Siemens Digital Industries has already grown its yearly revenue from $15 billion to $20 billion in the last two years as it transitioned its portfolio to the Siemens Xcelerator software-as-a-service (SaaS) model. This new cloud offering is sure to add on to this success.

“We continue to expand access to AWS’s extensive HPC resources including Amazon EC2 instances that use the latest generation of processors, and Elastic Fabric Adapter (EFA) which allows customers to run applications requiring high-levels of inter-node communications at scale on AWS,” said Ian Colle, general manager Batch Computing and HPC at AWS. “Through these resources, our customers are able to meet the engineering challenges of tomorrow, and accelerate innovation.”

Source: https://www.engineering.com