Cadence cloud licensing covers several different arrangements that Cadence groups under its OnCloud brand. They differ in who runs the infrastructure, who holds the cloud relationship, and what is counted. Cadence describes OnCloud as a platform that “allows design teams to deploy EDA and systems workloads, whether your use case is hybrid or all-cloud, backed by flexible business models”, from fully self-managed to Cadence-managed.[3] For software asset management the important questions are who is contractually responsible for the environment, whether the usual licence server still applies, and which unit is billed. This article describes each model as Cadence states it.
Cloud Passport
Cloud Passport is the customer-managed model. Cadence says that “customers gain the contractual ability to place Cadence tools in their own public cloud environment.”[1] The customer keeps its own relationship with the cloud provider and is the only point of contact with the public cloud vendor it chose to deploy Cadence software, and “the customer’s CAD and IT teams are solely responsible for the setup, maintenance, and support of their public cloud environment.”[1] Cadence names Amazon Web Services, Microsoft Azure, Google Cloud Platform and IBM Cloud as providers customers have used with this model.[1]
The page limits the programme to tools Cadence describes as cloud-ready: tools “tested and qualified for use on all leading public cloud platforms”, covering circuit simulation, power and EM analysis, logic simulation, formal verification, physical verification, timing signoff, extraction, power integrity and library characterization.[1] That list is a scoping statement for the model, not a list of licensed products. The page describes the benefit of the model as combinable: Cloud Passport can be used alongside other Cadence Cloud offerings as needed.[1]
What the page does not say is how licences are counted or served in a customer’s cloud. The page does not say how licences are counted, and it does not describe the host ID for a cloud licence server, a point where FlexNet-based products normally need a stable identifier. A customer entering the model should ask Cadence how its licence file and licence server host ID are handled in the cloud account, in writing, before moving servers. The on-premises mechanics in the FlexNet article remain the reference for how a licence file behaves.
Managed Cloud Service
The Managed Cloud Service is the Cadence-managed alternative. Cadence calls it a “SaaS-enabled EDA-optimized service” that provides “a fully integrated and proven cloud environment” for design, verification and implementation projects, serving a full front-to-back flow or peak capacity to augment an on-premises compute environment, with pre-installed Cadence tools in an environment built on AWS, Microsoft Azure or IBM Cloud.[3] The responsibility split is the reverse of Cloud Passport: Cadence runs the environment. The page lists a 30-day free trial and “Contact Us for Pricing”, so no unit of charge is public.[3]
Palladium and Protium Cloud
Palladium and Protium Cloud is hardware capacity delivered as a service. Cadence describes it as “a managed emulation and prototyping solution offering secure and easy access to pre-purchased gate capacity”, hosted in a Cadence-contracted data center, and says it turns what would have been a capital expenditure into an operational expense.[2] The unit is the gate. “Palladium Cloud capacity can be ordered in increments of 32 million gates up to a peak of 2 billion gates, while Protium Cloud can be ordered in increments for 150 million up to a peak of 1.2 billion gates.”[2] The page describes short-term access to dynamically scalable capacity and states that all Palladium and Protium usage modes are supported, along with access to SpeedBridge adapters.[2] It can be combined with the Managed Cloud Service for a cloud-hosted design flow.[2]
For a licence manager the entries to record are the contracted gate capacity, its increment, the peak, and the term of the activation, because “activating capacity when needed” is the point of the service. Cadence does not publish the rate card, the minimum commitment term or the overage mechanism.
OnCloud marketplace offerings
The OnCloud page lists marketplace offerings, each with a trial and a price route. The Managed Cloud Service and True Hybrid Cloud show a free trial for the first 30 days and “Contact Us for Pricing”. The CFD Simulation offering is the one public price: it is listed at “$2,000.00/mo • 200 Tokens/mo” with a free trial of “First 30 days or 24 hours”.[3] The page does not define what a token buys, so the token is recorded here as a monthly allotment tied to the offering, not as a unit that can be compared with other Cadence token schemes. The token licences for Liberate described elsewhere are a separate product mechanism.
OrCAD X OnCloud is a related but separate construct. Cadence says it is an optional feature of OrCAD X for cloud data management and collaboration, that users are assigned an account as part of a trial or purchase, and that using it is not required for the desktop features.[5] Single-user cloud licensing is stated for OrCAD X, with up to five installs and one active device, but “cloud floating licenses and license borrowing are not yet supported.”[5]
The cloud-platform evaluation agreement
Separate from the offerings above, Cadence publishes a click-through Software License Agreement for design materials accessed through its “web-based cloud orchestration and design management environment”. It grants a temporary, personal, non-transferable, non-exclusive right to use the design materials, which “are in use once you access” the Cloud Platform.[4] The right is limited to evaluation and demonstration within the user’s organization, excludes benchmarking and customer demonstrations, and applies to “a single user at a time” unless Cadence agrees otherwise in writing.[4] The term is 30 days or the term Cadence specifies in writing, whichever is less; the agreement ends automatically on non-compliance, and there is no support or maintenance.[4] Cadence “may monitor and collect configuration, performance, usage, and consumption data”, including to track entitlements, and the user may not block that monitoring.[4] The agreement is governed by California law, with international arbitration seated in San Francisco for licensees outside the United States.[4]
This agreement should not be read as the terms of production cloud use. It governs evaluation of design materials, and the production terms for Cloud Passport, Managed Cloud Service and Palladium and Protium Cloud are in the customer’s own order and agreements.
Practical checks
- Record which model each cloud workload uses, since responsibility for the environment differs between customer-managed and Cadence-managed models.
- Record gate capacity, increment, peak and activation dates for Palladium and Protium Cloud.
- Treat OnCloud trials as time-limited rights with their own start dates, and confirm whether a trial converts automatically to a paid month.
- Keep evaluation use of design materials separate from production use, because the evaluation agreement excludes production and benchmarking.
Out of scope
This article does not cover the Cadence Cloud brochure, the OnCloud Marketplace partner terms, the Cloud Passport partner programme terms, or the production Software License and Maintenance Agreement. None of those were retrievable as readable Cadence-hosted text for this edition.