Feature Story

By Kat Rollin

January 22, 2008 — Design engineers have been running Cadence software on SPARC systems and the Solaris Operating System (OS), for years, to design and verify advanced semiconductors, printed-circuit boards and systems used in consumer electronics, networking and telecommunications equipment, and computer systems. And for good reasons — proven performance, stability, and reliability for over two decades. Now you can experience the same benefits on x64 systems. In fact, Cadence was one of the first EDA technology vendors to provide broad support for the Solaris 10 OS on x64 systems for both desktop and server applications and supports over 200 applications on Solaris 10 on x64 systems.

Sun and Cadence

Cadence is a leading electronic design automation (EDA) technologies and services company, providing leading edge electronic design solutions that speed advanced integrated circuit and system designs to volume production. Sun and Cadence have worked together for nearly 20 years, delivering high-performance design environments and technology innovations to the EDA market. Today, many Cadence design platforms are developed on Sun hardware, the Solaris OS, and Sun's developer tools and are supported on the Solaris Operating System (OS). "The robust debugger and analysis tools in Sun Studio 11, along with DTrace help us develop better, higher performance code" says Tammy Hsu, Sr. IT Architect, Cadence. Sun Microelectronics uses Cadence to design chips for SPARC processor-based products. Working together, Sun focuses on ensuring that Cadence software is optimized for maximum efficiency and reliability for the Solaris OS running on Sun's SPARC and x64 systems. In addition to 64-bit porting of major applications, Sun also helps Cadence optimize EDA applications for Java, multithreading, and parallel processing to get the most out of innovative Sun technologies.

Rock Solid Solaris Operating System

One of greatest values of Cadence on Sun is the proven stability and reliability of the Solaris OS. Over the years, Sun has continued to innovate and improve the performance and features of the Solaris OS, while providing binary and source code compatibility. "Cadence and our customers have been running on Sun for years. Sun's compatibility guarantee is very important to us. When Sun releases a new version of the Solaris OS, Cadence just runs on it, enabling us to mix and match binaries built on a previous OS and compilers with the code from our current standards. We can take advantage of new Solaris features without re-writing our code" says Tammy Hsu, Sr. IT Architect, Cadence. "We've supported Solaris 10 for over two years. Its very reliable, free, and has a longer lifecycle than Linux, which means fewer support issues for our customers." With Cadence supporting the Solaris 10 OS on SPARC and x64 systems, your investment is protected with guaranteed compatibility. The same OS runs on all Sun systems, with platform feature parity between SPARC and x64 systems.

Anyone who runs the Solaris OS can attest too its reliability, with stories of systems staying up for many months. And with DTrace, you can find performance bottlenecks or locate problems much faster and on running systems, adding to the availability of the system. The platform engineers at Cadence find that DTace is much more powerful than tools that are available on other platforms, enabling them to quickly trace and resolve issues. "DTrace is not only useful for us in development, it also helps us trace and correct bugs in released software, so our customers win too" says Cadence's Tammy Hsu.

Now You Can Run Cadence on Solaris OS on x64 Systems

Now you can get the same stability and reliability running Cadence on x64 systems. Cadence supports the Solaris OS on x64 systems for over 200 of their applications, enabling you to take advantage of the price/performance of x64 platforms for your EDA needs, with the same performance as Solaris on SPARC. If you've been considering a move to an AMD Opteron or Intel Xeon platform to run Cadence, now you can migrate without learning a new operating system. With Cadence on Solaris x64 systems, you can access larger and more complex data sets and run what-if analysis and computationally intensive workloads faster and more efficiently. On the other hand, if you're already on x64 systems and want to take advantage of the powerful Solaris 10 OS, now you can. Solaris 10 brings better reliability and stability to the x64 marketplace, providing performance on x64 systems in a better overall package.

If you use Cadence tools that require a compiler, you can download the same robust, optimizing compilers Cadences uses to develop their applications — free of charge. Sun Studio 11 compilers allow you to leverage the latest in parallel programming and maximize throughput on the latest multicore UltraSPARC and x64 systems. Even single-threaded applications gain as the compilers can identify opportunities to parallelize execution and automatically, without source-code changes, produce back-end code to take advantage of this.

Years of proven rock solid stability, reliability, scalability, and quality. And now you can get the same benefits running Cadence on Solaris for x64 systems. You've loved Cadence on Sun. Now love it on Sun x64 systems too.

Formerly a systems engineer for Sun, Kat Rollin now reports on partner solutions for sun.com and develops marketing communications for the technology industry.