{"id":3943,"date":"2018-07-29T11:54:25","date_gmt":"2018-07-29T03:54:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.plunify.com\/en\/?page_id=3943"},"modified":"2019-05-01T08:00:12","modified_gmt":"2019-05-01T00:00:12","slug":"essential-considerations-fpga-design-cloud","status":"publish","type":"page","link":"https:\/\/www.plunify.com\/en\/essential-considerations-fpga-design-cloud\/","title":{"rendered":"3 Essential Considerations for FPGA design in the Cloud"},"content":{"rendered":"

Plunify and Xilinx announced a partnership<\/a> to make Vivado available on the Plunify Cloud platform, which operates on the Amazon Web Services (AWS) cloud. This is the first time that any fully-featured FPGA software is available under an on-demand cloud model. Cloud adoption is a huge step for any engineering organization. In this article, we discuss the key considerations, impact, benefits of cloud-enabled FPGA design, and how to improve the quality of results.<\/p>\n

There are 2 main benefits of this partnership<\/p>\n

A. On-demand and scalability<\/h2>\n

\"Vivado-cloud\"The most obvious benefit of this partnership is the on-demand feature of cloud computing. Licenses and virtual servers are purchased as and when you need them, and only for the amount of\u00a0time you used them. Resource flexibility and scalability safeguards you from over- or under-provisioning important resources that might have an adverse impact on your projects further down the road. It also removes the burden of on-premise infrastructure maintenance.<\/p>\n

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B. Overcoming the “one engineer, one computer” model<\/h2>\n

The most overlooked benefit is the potential of (almost) unlimited compute power and licenses<\/span>. FPGA teams are generally smaller and do not normally work with massive compute farms like their ASIC cousins. The typical FPGA design methodology is based on a setup of what we call the “one engineer, one computer” model.\u00a0 This model has worked well for the past decade. However, with increasing design complexity and larger device densities, we see that this approach is reaching its limitations. For higher-end device families, build runtime goes up to 24 hours, are more resource-hungry, and the number of build iterations have been steadily increasing.<\/p>\n

For teams who are already designing FPGAs on the cloud and for teams who are considering this approach,\u00a0here are 3 essential considerations.<\/p>\n

1. Providing Ease-of-use for FPGA Designers<\/h3>\n

One of the free-to-download tools under the Plunify Cloud platform is the FPGA Expansion Pack<\/a> for Vivado. This is a Xilinx Vivado plugin that adds cloud-enhanced functionality right into your Vivado toolbar to speed up design compilations. Together with a Plunify Cloud account, this plugin enables you to conveniently build and optimize designs on tens, even hundreds of Amazon Web Services machines at the same time.<\/p>\n

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