Chipmakers have been cramming higher complexity into smaller form factors for decades, in a bid to remain competitive and keep pace with Moore’s Law. But as feature capabilities and systemic complexities in the silicon increase, the design and verification process gets more complicated and time consuming. Semiconductor manufacturers need a storage platform that is fast, high capacity, and highly concurrent at scale. Common data storage challenges of powering EDA workloads include:

• Data silos make it difficult for design engineers and integrated EDA workflows to access, share, protect, and manage data during chip design lifecycle. Mid to large semiconductor design environments have the ability to over run any storage platform for EDA workflows. Over provisioning storage to mitigate scale complexity ends up incurring high infrastructure costs. Unlike all flash storage systems, file systems based on traditional disk (spinning or solid state) technologies provide limited predictability and scale out performance needed during simulation and verification phases thus impacting the overall tapeout timelines.
  

Pure Storage all-flash solutions boast a number of hardware and software features that make data storage simple, seamless, and sustainable.

These features include:

• The FlashBlade//S modular, flash-based storage architecture allows chip design projects to size and grow performance and capacity needs as workloads scale. No storage over provisioning is required.
• An OpEx model like Evergreen//One™ storage architecture allows business owners to optimize infrastructure costs and onboard active and new design projects quickly.
• True scale out and predictable performance on FlashBlade//S enables faster job turnaround times thus completing the chip design and tape out phases quickly.
• AI-powered analytics that catch issues before they occur and recommend solutions for preventing them with Pure1 Meta®.
• Unified fast file and object (UFFO) storage that can power your most demanding EDA workloads, including RTL simulation, with FlashBlade®.

FlashBlade is a UFFO storage platform that scales out non-disruptively with your storage needs. FlashBlade is designed from the bottom up to meet the high-concurrency requirements of semiconductor and EDA workloads, including build and RTL regressions. It combines file and object storage protocols with the low latency, massive parallelism, and high throughput capabilities of enterprise all-flash storage

UFFO storage is a new category of data storage that consolidates two traditionally separate storage paradigms—file and object storage—into one performant data solution. It enables you to replace a siloed collection of data warehouses, network-attached storage (NAS) devices, and direct-attached storage (DAS) devices with a single scale-out storage solution that delivers multidimensional performance at scale.