CERN relies on Cadence services to provide an advanced and integrated design environment

PARIS, FRANCE: Cadence Design Systems Inc., a leader in global design innovation, announced that CERN, the European Organization for Nuclear Research, is relying on Cadence Services to create and maintain design environments for internal design teams as well as for design teams in a number of collaborating physics institutes throughout Europe and the United States.

Cadence helps CERN by leveraging the Cadence Services teams and the organization’s pre-existing solution components to create and maintain design environments focused on CERN’s requirements. Key requirements include automating/developing and managing CERN’s analog/mixed-signal design flow, automating the digital flow, process design kit (PDK) development and maintenance, support and training.

“We were in the position to create a method to manage multiple designs from multiple design groups that collaborate with us,” said Alessandro Marchioro, manager of the microelectronics group at CERN. “It is an immense task and very time consuming if you do not have a functional method in place. We turned to Cadence and were surprised that the offering of the Cadence Services group was exactly what we were looking for. To outsource the creating and maintaining of the design environment has saved us a lot of time and resources. We are very pleased with the work and support provided by the Cadence Services team, which has become a member of our own team.”

“The number of successful design submissions from CERN and our collaborating institutes has tripled in the last two years, reflecting the effect of Cadence Services on the designers’ productivity,” said Kostas Kloukinas, microelectronics engineer at CERN. “Streamlined design methodology, customized training courses and ad-hoc design services have boosted productivity of the CERN microelectronics CAD support team.”

Cadence Services help customer design teams maximize their productivity. The Cadence Services experts become part of the customer's design team, ensuring that Cadence technology is applied in the most beneficial way to achieve the customer's business - and in this case scientific research goals.

In addition to local support, a secure collaboration infrastructure ensures efficient and real-time remote collaboration with Cadence design experts. One of the key deliveries from the Cadence Services team was the new releases of CERN’s IBM-based PDK that are also used by its partners, as well as the delivery of a specific CERN methodology kit, which addresses the analog/mixed-signal flow and its challenges.

“CERN is a perfect example of how Cadence Services can increase efficiency and meet expectations toward quality and maintainability,” said Wolfgang Stronski, marketing director for Europe at Cadence. “Sharing its technical know-how, the Cadence team has become part of CERN’s development team and can align with their objectives.”

The CERN physics department is deploying the Cadence analog and digital end-to-end solutions as well as the Cadence verification and Allegro PCB solutions throughout the support of its CERN IT department. By adopting Silicon Realization EDA solutions from Cadence, CERN increases designer productivity.