It can get tedious hearing the weekly, even daily, stories about the efficiency of computing in the cloud.  One can tell by the exponential growth in data centers how popular cloud computing has become in mainstream corporate IT worlds.  FPGA designers, however, are still in the early stages of trusting their designs to cloud-based service providers.  Vendors of both FPGAs and EDA tools are offering cloud services to more advanced customers, but there is also a cottage industry of independent design specialists offering FPGA front-end (and even partial back-end) design services.

One company based in Singapore, PLunify (http://www.plunify.com) has been offering such services for more than a year.  At the end of July, however, PLunify significantly upgraded the scalability and configurability of its tools (http://plunify.blogspot.com/2011/07/revamp-of-our-platform-and-ourselves.html). The company enhanced its encryption algorithms and added additional encryption at several layers to insure the security of third-party designs.  It added Amazon Web Services Application Programming Interfaces to its existing Amazon S3 storage capabilities.  And it added Virtual Private Network capability to its networked design efforts.

PLunify offers Icarus Verilog and GHDL editors, and shows no bias between Verilog and VHDL simulation languages.  Most of the services offered are simulation, with additional benchmarking offered.  But it’s obvious that this could be extended to verification methods in the future.

Given the conservative nature of many chip-level design engineers, traditional EDA tools and software suites from FPGA vendors will not die off tomorrow.  But such software developers had better start re-examining their assumptions about seat licenses, site licenses, and tool reuse today, because design is moving rapidly to the cloud, perhaps permanently.