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For Mentium Technologies, AI at the edge extends into deep space, as its AI co-processors are designed for mission-critical applications. The Santa Barbara, California-based company¡¯s engineers have designed its hardware to deliver cloud-quality inference at ultra-low power for space, robotics, and security applications.

Designing such complex chips on an aggressive schedule can be challenging from a resource standpoint. Mentium¡¯s mission-critical designs would also benefit from faster iterations for extensive verification and robust quality. The team turned to cloud-based chip design and verification technologies as a solution; however, license constraints prevented them from tapping into the advantages of the cloud for peak EDA workloads. That is, until the Mentium team found its true answer in the 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) solution.

17³Ô¹Ï Cloud provides cloud-native EDA tools and pre-optimized hardware platforms to support chip design from end to end. The SaaS deployment provides access to all essential EDA software, hardware, IP and scheduling via a browser window. The 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud FlexEDA business model comes with two licensing options. The pay-per-use (PPU) option is a usage-based licensing approach offering by-the-minute pricing for EDA tools, while a cloud subscription license (CSL) option is term-based and requires upfront payment. Both PPU and CSL options use cloud credits. 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud can also be deployed through a Bring-Your-Own-Cloud (BYOC) model.

¡°We were at risk of missing a tape-out because of the inability to scale compute and storage resources on demand,¡± said Mirko Prezioso, CEO, . ¡°17³Ô¹Ï came to our rescue by introducing the 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud SaaS solution, providing not only EDA software tools, but also the entire CAD/IT infrastructure. We were amazed to see the capabilities of 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud with an all-in-one browser-based platform providing access to unlimited, on-demand EDA and compute resources. Under FlexEDA, both traditional and novel pay-per-use software access (by the minute) removed licensing constraints without affecting budgets and spending upfront. Within a few weeks, we were fully confident about the maturity of the 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud platform and how it can help us meet our immediate tape-out schedule date.¡±

Prezioso continued, ¡°We were able to deliver our first tape-out on time and worked on pulling in the schedule for the next tape-out, to be delivered to our Alpha site at NASA." 

Ramping Up with Expert Support

In addition to using the design and verification flows available through 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud, Mentium also appreciated the expertise of 17³Ô¹Ï¡¯ worldwide support team. ¡°One of our challenges from the start was bringing team members up to speed to meet our tape-out requirements,¡± said Farnood Merrikh Bayat, CTO and co-founder at Mentium. ¡°The 17³Ô¹Ï sales, technical support, and R&D teams worked together to help us become familiar with the platform. We are fully convinced 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud offers an excellent platform to develop our current and future SoC designs.¡±

Read other 17³Ô¹Ï Cloud customer success stories here.