Microsoft is creating a joint innovation lab with Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) to further collaborate on the integration of cloud computing and virtual machines (VM) designed for electronics design automation (EDA) workloads.

The cloud and silicon giants intend to develop new VM types for greater CPU performance focusing on the amount of cores required, memory-to-core ratio, and local storage to improve EDA workloads in complex integrated-circuit designs, according to Microsoft. 

The companies also intend to create new tools and methodologies to advance EDA workloads running in the Azure cloud. TSMC and Microsoft claim they can fuel a new category of EDA by boosting computational power in the cloud.

“Using the vast computational power of Azure services and TSMC’s silicon expertise, we have been able to optimize production runs around the world,” Rani Borkar, corporate VP leading Azure hardware and infrastructure at Microsoft, wrote in a blog post.

“It is not uncommon for EDA design jobs to take months due to in-house compute limitations. With access to Azure’s burstable resources to scale to tens of thousands of cores quickly, silicon designers are now able to achieve much faster time to market with improved efficiencies while dealing with their surge demand,” Borkar explained.

Microsoft and TSMC said they plan to share the fruits of their labor with the semiconductor industry at large. The companies, which have been working together since 2018, previously developed an Azure-based architecture for TSMC’s Virtual Design Environment with “refined cloud resource selection and storage architectures for specific workloads, and demonstrated cost versus performance optimizations for scalable workloads,” Borkar wrote. 

TSMC and Microsoft are also inviting their respective partners to participate in the lab with an eye toward transforming integrated-circuit design in the cloud. 

“Through our collaboration with Cloud Alliance members, we can lower entry barriers of cloud adoption for our common customers and help customers conduct [integrated-circuit] design securely in the cloud and achieve faster time-to-market,” Cliff Hou, SVP of technology development at TSMC, said in a statement.

Microsoft and TSMC claim that they and others can gain a competitive advantage by using the cloud for silicon design.