Emulation, which has been used for developing low-power chips, is now being viewed by large chipmakers at as a way of reducing costs in simulation farms.

This is an interesting twist on the economics of some very pricey hardware, which wasn’t considered a huge growth market over the past decade because of the upfront costs, and it follows what’s been going on across large IT departments. Enterprise IT departments have been wrestling with the problems of energy consumed by servers for the past half-dozen years. In addition to machines drawing power while being underutilized—the key drivers behind virtualization and cloud computing—the cost of cooling densely packed racks of air-cooled servers has been skyrocketing.

It’s ironic that Moore’s Law is to blame for all of this. Advanced chip geometries have allowed for much more computing capability, but they also have been responsible for driving up the heat inside these cabinets to the point where air is no longer a sufficient cooling medium. In some cases the noise from circulating fans has risen above the safe levels allowed by OSHA, which is why water cooling is making a comeback in some of the largest installations. Water is a more efficient medium for cooling chips than air.

Emulation is benefiting from the same kinds of dynamics in simulation. As Jim Kenney, product marketing manager at Mentor Graphics noted, “Power, cooling and facilities space are part of the cost of ownership. For an equivalent amount of work, emulation is smaller and uses less power than an equivalent server farm.”

Business is up at all three of the major emulation companies—Mentor, Cadence and EVE. Our guess is it will continue to rise, in part because of these kinds of economic tradeoffs and in part because the software development teams need all the help they can leverage in getting software to run on chips out the door in a reasonable amount of time.

But putting this all in perspective, it’s the chips that caused the overheating in the first place. Now the machinery used to create those chips is overheating because of those chips, driving a new market for even bigger machinery. It’s an odd development, but it could be one of the most innovative business models ever created.

–Ed Sperling

Tags: Cadence, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys

This entry was posted on Thursday, March 17th, 2011 at 3:18 pm and is filed under Editorial, Opinion. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.