Microsoft Silicon scaled Calibre on Azure to shrink physical verification run times from days to hours

In this presentation from U2U North America 2024, Mike Kang and Padmavathy Anantha Padmanabhan of Microsoft Azure Silicon, describe how they boosted the performance of Calibre in the cloud.

As a traditional leader in both software and cloud computing, Microsoft is no stranger to innovation. Recently, Microsoft extended that spirit of innovation to semiconductor design with its own silicon development team. Microsoft recognized early the benefits of scaling critical workloads, such as physical verification, to the cloud. By collaborating with the Siemens EDA Calibre team, the Microsoft Silicon development team developed a methodology that can provide faster time to tapeout. They achieved physical verification results in a few hour results using the Azure Cloud where traditional on-prem runs would have taken days to achieve results. This level of efficiency demonstrates the incredible productivity increase that leveraging the scale of the cloud can have on design team productivity. Teams can kick off the verification job at night, come in the next morning, and identify and address issues the next day, losing no productivity towards waiting on results of long compute runs.