Lance Draper, creates a sharing environment for Arm Academic Access

Arm Academic Access (AAA) adds some extra development environment requirements but is also an opportunity to take fresh look at how you support your hardware development activities. At the University of Southampton we had systems in place to support our Electronic Design Automation (EDA) tools for education and research but AAA allowed us to put in place an improved environment for sharing among the team.

AAA requires a User to undertake their “research on campus at the University and on University provided facilities and equipment”. Given current working conditions around the world we felt the best option was to create a virtual server environment where users could access all the tools and Intellectual Property (IP). 

The system allows approximately six users to remotely upload and use ARM IP deliverables, ARM Development Tools and suite of Electronic Design Automation tools using a computer connected to the University network or using remote VPN connections, additionally the system also allows sharing of designs among authorised users.

The new virtual shared development environment allows users to develop Software on Chip (SoC) designs using ARM cores and peripherals and gain early deployment on Xilinx and Intel Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA).

Linux or Windows?
Southampton already maintains a central distribution of Linux based EDA tools such as Cadence and Synopsys which made establishing the new development environment on a Linux operating system the obvious choice. We also have a number of virtual machine-based EDA/CAD servers that have been successfully used over many years for teaching so we took the same virtual approach for this environment.

The specific details of the virtual hardware and operating system are:
•    16 CPU cores
•    256GB RAM
•    1TB Disk (200G used to date)
•    Redhat Enterprise version 8 Operating System

In order to transfer completed designs from the development environment to computers equipped with FPGA programmers we created a file share on the central University filestore mounted via NFS in the development environment and also mountable via SMB on other computers. The development environment also mounts the centrally maintained EDA tools filesystem via NFS so users can run tools such as Cadance and Synopsys as required.

User Interface for Remote Access
As users need to access from the campus and VPN networks, we chose X2GO for the GUI interface as it has good performance of low bandwidth connections.

It also works with a number of standard Linux desktops such as MATE, GNOME, KDE and XFCE which we are using.

https://wiki.x2go.org/doku.php/doc:newtox2go

Arm IP and Development Tools Software

At Southampton we have FLEXLM license servers for several activities so adding the AAA needs was relatively simple. AAA provides 10 (ten) seats of ARM Development Studio Gold Edition 2021. Use is controlled by a license from ARM with the licenses hosted on our existing FLEXLM license servers. AAA only provides a single concurrent license to the Virtual System Models so have a virtual environment where users can share work and the concurrent license is important. 

Electronic Design Automation Tools installed local
In addition to the centrally maintained EDA/CAD tools we installed the following locally in AAA development environment.
Xilinx Vivado 2021 (free download from Xilinx) for Xlinx FPGAs
Quartus Prime from Intel  (License required)

About the author

Lance Draper is Research Systems Manager at the University of Southampton. Lance has spent many years designing and supporting a wide range of research IT systems for engineering and applied science activities.