The News: Marvell Technology, a supplier of data infrastructure semiconductor solutions, announced it has selected Amazon Web Services (AWS) as its cloud provider for electronic design automation (EDA). A cloud-first approach aims to help Marvell quickly and securely scale its service on the AWS platform, rise to the challenges brought by increasingly intricate design processes, and deliver continuous innovation for the growing needs across the automotive, carrier, data center, and enterprise infrastructure markets it serves. Read the Marvell Press Release here.
Marvell Boosts Cloud EDA Cause with AWS Selection
Analyst Take: Marvell made a bold and adept move to extend its extensive working relation with AWS to now include entrusting its EDA capabilities on the AWS cloud platform. Marvell now gains access to the vast portfolio of AWS services such as secure, elastic, high-performance compute capacity in the cloud to fulfill data transfer, latency, speed, and security of intellectual property (IP) requirements.
From my view, Marvell’s extensive relation as a key semiconductor supplier to AWS and its mission to optimize the design and delivery of cloud services helped play an integral role in determining that AWS cloud security provides the ironclad assurances needed to entrust the company’s most valuable EDA intellectual property (IP) on a third-party cloud.
For background, EDA encapsulates the specialized and compute-intensive processes used in chip making and is integral to Marvell’s overall research and development (R&D). Due to the computationally intensive nature of EDA workloads, running EDA on premises has now become cost prohibitive. As such, I anticipate that Marvell can gain cost containment management gains, especially as designs become more highly integrated with smaller technology nodes and increasingly intricate chips such as system on chips (SoCs).
Additionally, I see Marvell gaining elastic scaling benefits, allowing optimization of valuable computing resources. For designers, access to open-ended, infinite computing resources is critical for the simulation and verification of integrated circuit (IC) designs which are compute-intensive and can require several days to complete simulation exercises while other tasks can require little to no compute resources.
Now Marvell can forego the expense of purchasing and maintaining on premise compute resources that remain idle or underused when EDA verification and simulation are not engaged. Through AWS Marvell can use flexible on demand instances pricing models (i.e., rent virtual computers) to help cost optimize its cloud EDA implementation. Plus, Marvell avoids expensive on-prem CapEx to run its EDA.
The Marvell deal is a sales and marketing EDA boost for AWS as Google Cloud and Microsoft Azure are collaborating with Synopsys to support chipset makers in adopting cloud EDA. The Google Cloud partnership, for instance, touts using the Synopsys Cloud “Bring Your Own Cloud” deployment architecture on Google Cloud which is enabled through its cloud metering service that leverages Google Cloud regional MIGs (Managed Instance Groups) for autoscaling and multi-zone deployment. Secrets used by Synopsys Cloud can be securely stored in Google Secret Manager and usage data is encrypted using Google Cloud key management, providing a secure design environment. Now AWS (i.e., Amazon EC2 at AWS) can tout Marvell’s selection to capture more mind share and potential market share in the fast evolving cloud EDA sweepstakes.
Overall, I believe by performing EDA workloads in the AWS cloud Marvell strengthens its competitive profile, particularly in gaining industry-wide portfolio development and time to market advantages. Plus, AWS can showcase the Marvell collaboration as validation for its cloud EDA offering. The relationship is mutually beneficial for the cloud EDA ecosystem.
Disclosure: Futurum Research is a research and advisory firm that engages or has engaged in research, analysis, and advisory services with many technology companies, including those mentioned in this article. The author does not hold any equity positions with any company mentioned in this article.
Analysis and opinions expressed herein are specific to the analyst individually and data and other information that might have been provided for validation, not those of Futurum Research as a whole.
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Author Information
Ron is an experienced, customer-focused research expert and analyst, with over 20 years of experience in the digital and IT transformation markets, working with businesses to drive consistent revenue and sales growth.
Ron holds a Master of Arts in Public Policy from University of Nevada — Las Vegas and a Bachelor of Arts in political science/government from William and Mary.
