Cloud Computing – A 4-letter word in the world of semiconductor design?

Nasty little bugger, isn't it?

When it comes to cloud computing, I must be different than most of my chip design colleagues of days gone by.  The mere mention of the term, cloud computing, has invoked visceral reactions in many engineers that just doesn’t make sense to me.  The feedback from these highly skeptical engineers ranges from “spaced out technology” to nothing short of posting their RTL code on Digg, and these are the more sublime reactions!

I want to delve into the technical and engineering psyche of chip designers to uncover what I perceive as some of their underlying motives for resisting what is clearly an IT movement that is more than a passing fancy.

I am engineer.  In fact, more of a research engineer, than strict RnD.  As such, I can speak freely about my fellow chip design engineers, because at heart, I am one of them.  I live among them.  Chip designers are not an easy breed to work with.  We’re trained to be skeptics, always challenging a position.  I recently read an blog about an engineering seminar where the sales & marketing team felt the overall content was pretty blah and dull.  However, from the engineering side, the seminar that was given a superb rating by the attendees.  Why? Because the only thing the engineers were able to complain about was the fact that the lunch organizers did not optimize the lunch line by using both sides of the serving bar.  You see it’s all a matter of perspective, and chip designers are always looking to solve a problem!

A chip designer accepts a 3rd party IT software solution only because he/she has finally come to grips with the fact that they fully understand how the solution works inside and out, by fully vetting the software architecture in their minds, knowing full well that if they put their minds to it, they could quickly come up with a better solution.  Cloud computing, SaaS & software virtualization is technology steeped in software mash-ups that “cloud” the waters of clarity for chip designers, i.e. where is my data being stored, what processor am I running on, why is my performance 8% slower than on my native Linux?  These are questions that demand answers before chips can be designed in “clouds”.

…more to come.