The Sustainability Journey Across Tech Ecosystems

Given the greatly increased focus on the topic of sustainability across the tech industry, it’s never surprising to see an individual company talk about the efforts it’s now making to decrease its environmental impact. But for some organizations, the path towards those goals is much more nuanced and multi-faceted than it may first appear to be.

Such is the case with Cadence, a company primarily known for its work in creating tools to help design semiconductors, but which has efforts in several other areas as well. The company has recognized that while it’s certainly important to look at individual enhancements in sustainability that it can help enable on its own, it’s equally important to consider things from a holistic, system-level perspective. As a company that plays a critical, baseline role in overall tech industry supply chains, Cadence realizes there is a growing interest in looking at macro-level improvements in areas such as power efficiency and electricity usage across tech industry ecosystems that it can also help reduce.

Putting it another way, because of its critical role at the very start of the tech manufacturing process, Cadence can impact the power efficiency of the enormous range of chips and circuit boards that are built using its tools, even down to where those boards are placed at the data center level. At the same time, they also recognize the need to think from the finished system level on down to achieve efficiencies at higher macro levels.

At the specific level, Cadence’s sustainability efforts begin with the company’s core EDA (electronic design automation) chip design tools. On the software side, for example, the company has started leveraging artificial intelligence (AI) to assist its users in creating semiconductor designs that both consume less power and use that power budget more effectively. In a manner not unlike automatically passing on and integrating best practices for power efficiency, the Cadence Joint Enterprise Data and AI (JedAI) Platform of design tools can, in some cases, help achieve power usage improvements of up to 35%.

In addition to power efficiency, the latest Cadence tools can help with the related but different area of thermal analysis. By improving how heat is generated and distributed across a chip or circuit board’s design, the tool can reduce the need for extra cooling mechanisms, further improving the overall power efficiency of the entire system.

In addition to software, Cadence also offers chip designers customized compute resources that allow them to test the operation and performance of their designs in hardware via emulation. After years of selling Palladium hardware units to individual companies, Cadence now also offers computing test resources via the cloud, giving more designers access to these critical services by sharing them. This sharing directly translates to more power-efficient usage of that emulation hardware because more people can use a single system.

Moving beyond these individual elements, the company also focuses on more holistic trends. At a basic level, semiconductors have moved well beyond their tech industry beginnings. They are now powering everything from automobiles to home appliances, medical devices, toys, manufacturing equipment, agricultural tools… virtually everything we’ve come to rely on in our personal and professional lives. As a result, Cadence’s breadth and depth of influence have grown tremendously. This, in turn, allows the company to reflect on macro-level trends (and challenges) that the semiconductor revolution is enabling.

Performance-wise, for example, the industry is in a never-ending game of needing to increase performance while decreasing power consumption. In many ways, Cadence and other tech industry supply chain companies have succeeded spectacularly in this regard, bringing immense computing power into increasingly tiny packages. At the same time, as society’s growth and dependence on semiconductors have increased, some critical warning signs are on the horizon.

As impressive as new generative AI (GenAI) software and services may be, for example, the computing resources they require are headed towards power consumption demands that can be measured at a level that is a percentage of the entire world’s energy use. In fact, a recent study by the International Energy Agency showed that data centers are consuming 1-2% of global power, with some predicting it will grow much more. If those trends aren’t somehow tempered, it’s not impossible to imagine a world where power generation is regulated and licensed out in a manner conceptually similar to the limited resources of RF (radio frequency) signals used in telecommunications.

In that light, Cadence is also helping to think through the more efficient use of large data centers through “digital twinning.” One big challenge, for example, is that many data centers are set up or provisioned to consume a set amount of power based on the number of servers and the air conditioning or other cooling equipment they include. While that’s logical on one hand, it doesn’t always account for the ebb and flow of the power draw across those servers and cooling systems in real-world environments. As a result, in many situations where data centers are over-provisioned with more power than they need (to avoid the occasional surges they do require), some of that power is wasted.

“We view sustainability holistically, from the chip to the system. And we impact sustainability at the heart of the industry, the data center.”

Karna Nisewaner, General Counsel and Corporate Secretary, Cadence

Cadence’s new DataCenter Design Software and Insight Platform are another example of the company’s work on overall system analysis. Using them, the company has found in certain cases that it can help reduce the stranded energy capacity of data centers by up to 66%. At an individual data center level, that’s certainly a big improvement, but extending it out to overall tech industry ecosystems becomes significantly impactful.

These efforts are also an important part of the bigger-picture perspective that Cadence has started to develop and implement. As mentioned before, given the rapid and expansive increase in influence that semiconductors and tech-related products have across the global economy, the company is increasing its focus on the collective effort that tech industry supply chain players can have. While it’s certainly important for companies to continue their individual efforts, the biggest and most effective impact can be made when many companies work together to drive system-level efficiencies.

It's not likely to be an easy process, but it’s certainly a journey worth starting.

Bob O’Donnell is the president and chief analyst of TECHnalysis Research, LLC a market research firm that provides strategic consulting and market research services to the technology industry and professional financial community. You can follow him on Twitter @bobodtech.