[Lramseyer]

As a hardware developer, I love seeing EDA tools getting YC's attention and resources. When hardware designers talk about how terrible EDA tools are though (myself included,) I find that it's a lot of the pot calling the kettle black. Most semiconductor companies have the most ancient IT infrastructure and tooling. Like at my current company, we're still using perforce. Instead of using SSH, my coworkers VNC into a server to run their terminals. A surprising number of them still use Notepad++!

Encouraging modern practices and enabling developers to migrate to newer development and development adjacent tools will be the huge value add with a product like this. At my company and some of the other companies I have worked for, we primarily use Synopsys for our tooling, but in reality, we use Cadence and Siemens tools occasionally. Being able to be more vendor agnostic, and tool agnostic, would be extremely useful. I noticed that you're using ventilator, but are there plans in the future to support other vendor tools?

Promoting the use of natively running apps (even if they're thin client web apps) is a huge win in my book too! VNC and VDIs are a terrible way to work. I really hate having to deal with the 40ms latency for every key and mouse event and font scaling that never works properly.

Another question I have, is about cost - I'm not a cloud billing guy, so I don't know the numbers off hand. But from my understanding, hardware development typically sees pretty high compute resource utilization, which is why I had always assumed that in-housing compute infrastructure made financial sense. Since it's on the cloud, how does it compare to on-prem computing from a cost perspective?

[pkkim]

Thanks for your thoughts! We are indeed planning to add support for other vendor tools, including the Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens simulators.

Cost for cloud vs on prem is very specific to design complexity. For the designs we're working with, we have seen that compute is cost effective on the cloud with respect to building out on-prem compute. We expect that to change as we support larger designs, and we have support for on-prem compute firmly on our roadmap.

[Lramseyer]

Great! Yeah, I imagine you guys have a lot on your plates. Looking forward to hearing more from you guys!