Cadence acquisition provides foothold in digital twins

The addition of Future Facilities’ technologies and expertise supports the Cadence Intelligent System Design strategy and enables companies to make informed business decisions about data centre design, operations and lifecycle management that reduce their carbon footprint.

Future Facilities’ product portfolio includes an electronics thermal solution that augments Cadence’s leading Celsius Thermal Solver, as well as innovative computational fluid dynamics (CFD) electronics cooling simulation technology that optimises the performance and cooling efficiency of power-hungry data centers.

The company’s technology virtualises the data centre ecosystem, creating a 3D digital twin that allows operators to predict, visualise and quantify the impact of any change in the data center prior to implementation and during operations. This allows customers to optimise business goals with facility design and operational efficiencies.

Future Facilities’ proven technologies are used by leading hyperscale, enterprise data centre, managed services and colocation providers, including Hewlett Packard Enterprise, Digital Realty, Equinix and Kao Data.

Data centre design and operation involves a complex supply chain—construction, services, IT and electronics—including the design of efficient domain-specific chips to PCBs to the chillers for cooling.

By integrating CFD techniques with a wide range of data centre infrastructure management (DCIM) tools and power and cooling modules, Future Facilities simulates the impact of changes in servers on physical capacity, power infrastructure and cooling.

This increases uptime and capacity utilisation by predicting hotspots before they occur. The solution also improves data center power usage effectiveness (PUE) by eliminating redundant power consumption.

“The global data centre market is driving the digital world and is immense with investments upwards of $200 billion a year,” said Tom Beckley, senior vice president and general manager of the Custom IC & PCB Group at Cadence. “The acquisition of Future Facilities boosts our Fidelity CFD solution with digital twin solutions, including electronics cooling and energy management that helps businesses maximise capacity, improve energy efficiency, reduce costs and mitigate critical infrastructure risk.”

Future Facilities’ 6Sigma Digital Twin simulation and optimisation platform lets customers model and analyse the performance of data centers by closely monitoring airflow, heat transfer, cooling, power and capacity. The CFD simulations predict cost profiles and capacity and model improvement options. The addition of Future Facilities’ experienced team and proven technologies enables Cadence to provide comprehensive chip, package, PCB and system data centre solutions that deliver efficiency gains and power savings and minimize downtime.

“Using advanced CFD brings tremendous benefits when analyzing thermal efficiencies in the data centre,” said Hassan Moezzi, founder and CEO of Future Facilities. “We are excited to join the Cadence team and look forward to combining our data center and electronics technology solutions with Cadence’s expertise in Intelligent System Design to further advance performance, sustainability and energy efficiency from chip design to all elements of the data centre right up to the chillers that are critical components in data centre design and operations.”

The terms of the transaction were not disclosed. The acquisition is expected to be immaterial to Cadence revenue and earnings this year and subject to customary closing conditions.