Launch HN: SiLogy (YC W24) – Chip design and verification in the cloud

Pretty much most of them. They might buy a small IP or two here and there, but for the rest everyone develops their design mostly in house. It's not 100s of millions, that's a ridiculous amount of money unless you are designing like a huge CPU or TPU or so. We design (can't give company name) quite large chips with complex analog and digital in 7nm and 5nm as a start-up and our seed funding was less than 20 million. This is kind of bare minimum funding for a semi start-up anyhow.

> On the topic of web viewing, do you know that engineers want this? In my experience, managers liked it because they could get an overview quickly, but the engineers hated it because it involved copy-pasting paths from the browser to their local tools.

In my experience it's the opposite. While some firms issue Linux workstations to their engineers most use VDIs (and god forbid sometimes VNC) hosted in a datacenter that can be far from the office. The already poor latency becomes atrocious when they say open Verdi over LSF, which is X-forwarded from the host to the VM before getting encoded and sent to the client.

Web tools bring the interface and rendering over to the client side and allow for a much smoother experience even if the server is physically far away.

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.

This is awesome! As a software person who dabbles in hardware, I cannot believe that HW folks put up with such arcane, slow, and cumbersome tools. I think anyone who’s critical of this idea has no idea how good they could be having it.

Thank you for tackling this critical problem for logic designiners. I think the tools available are much too old for fast paced workflows.

From my experience attempting to get a similar workflow down for my company:

I tried to use verilator a while back but ultimately I couldn't because it didn't have same constraints in the verilog language features that I was going to use in production. It doesn't even matter who was missing a feature, verilator or the proprietary tool, it was just about getting them to be same that caused the cognitive dissonance that I didn't want to deal with.

I ultimately decided to move away from verilator and use the clunky proprietary tools since it was what would be used in production. Getting "verilator compatibility" seemed like a "nice to have".

Second, the a winning local-first framework of verilator wasn't really established. You show in your example running a test from the yaml file using what looks like a bash script. Even as an experienced programmer who knows bash and sh well, I still find it very hard to write complex thoughts in it. The last high level attempt I found to bridge this gap is likely https://www.myhdl.org/ I don't know them personally, but it seemed like they had some very good thoughts on what makes writing good hardware level tests good. I think it would be worth reaching out to them if you haven't already.

The one thing that even more critical was a way to run our tests locally. The 10-20 seconds it takes to start a docker image (best case) in the cloud is really frustrating when you are "so close to finding a bug" and you "just want to see if this one line change is going to fix it". Once we got our whole pipeline going, it would take 1-6 minutes to "start a run" since it often had to rebuild previous steps that cache large parts of the design.

So I think you will want to see how you can help bring people's "local's first" workflows slowly into the cloud. Some tools (or just tutorials) that help you take a failing test, and run it locally and on the cloud will be really good especially as you get people to transition!