Distributed EDA Meets Accelerated Hardware: Gauda's OPC Points The Way

In Divide And Conquer, I made some arguments for the inevitable dominance of distributed algorithms in the EDA industry. In Need For Speed, I argued for, among other things, using graphics card-based acceleration for EDA (Nvidia's CUDA technology).

What happens when these two get together? Gauda's new optical proximity correction (OPC) tool. The tool not only uses existing graphic cards (from the likes of Nvidia and the erstwhile ATI) but also uses sophisticated distributed algorithms to accelerate OPC upto 200x (really? 200x??) faster. Rather than a flash in the pan, I'd say Gauda is the pioneer in a direction that is soon to be well-traveled by the EDA biggies.

Tags : EDA, Distributed Computing, ASIC, VLSI