We design, run, and tune the compute that sits behind your silicon, from regression farms to full-chip verification and signoff, so your engineers spend their time on the design instead of the cluster.
Bursty, licence-bound, memory-hungry, and wrapped in NDAs. Generic cloud and generic clusters leave money and tape-out days on the table.
A nightly regression or a signoff push can demand 10× your steady-state cores for a few hours, then nothing. Sizing for the peak wastes capital; sizing for the average misses the deadline.
Your real constraint is the tool licence, not the silicon. Without licence-aware scheduling, expensive seats sit idle while jobs queue behind them.
Netlists and GDS are the crown jewels. Every environment has to prove isolation, auditability, and data residency before a single job runs.
Fully managed environments plus the consultancy to design them right. Vendor-neutral across silicon, cloud, and EDA toolchains.
We stand up and operate the full stack: compute, parallel storage, interconnect, and scheduler. Then we keep it healthy around the clock against your SLA.
Schedule against tool seats, not just cores. We model your licence pools so dispatch tracks the constraint that actually costs you money.
Keep steady-state work on-prem and send the peaks (regressions, signoff, characterisation) to the cloud, with data staged and torn down automatically.
From a flow audit to a full cloud migration. We benchmark your real jobs, design the target, and hand over the runbooks. Or we stay and run it for you.
An honest look at the trade-offs. Owning it, renting a vendor chamber, and having us run it each win on something different. The table below shows where.
| strongpartialweak | In-houseyou own & operate | SEMACAwe run it for you | EDA vendor chambervendor-managed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Upfront capital | Weak: High: buy and refresh hardware | Strong: None | Strong: None |
| Pay only for what you run | Weak: No: sized for the peak | Strong: Yes: metered to real jobs | Partial: Reserved blocks, paid ahead |
| Licence-aware scheduling | Partial: Only if you build it | Strong: Built in | Partial: Limited visibility |
| Burst for tape-out peaks | Weak: Capped by owned hardware | Strong: On demand, then torn down | Partial: Capped, premium overage |
| Time to first job | Weak: Months to procure | Strong: Hours | Strong: Fast: already provisioned |
| HPC operations on you | Weak: You hire and keep the team | Strong: Managed to an SLA | Strong: Managed by the vendor |
| Toolchain flexibility | Strong: Your stack, your rules | Strong: Vendor-neutral | Weak: One vendor's stack |
| IP control and isolation | Strong: Inside your own walls | Strong: Isolated, on your terms | Partial: Vendor-controlled |
| All-in cost at scale | Partial: Capex plus ops headcount | Strong: Opex, no idle waste | Weak: Premium, margin-stacked |
| Strong on |
We don't win by being a cheaper chamber. We win by removing the waste the chamber bills you for, like idle capacity and under-used licences, on infrastructure you control. See what that looks like on your numbers.
Each phase produces something useful on its own, even if you never take the next one.
We profile your real jobs (runtimes, memory, I/O, licence waits) and map where the time and money are going. You get a sized plan whether or not you build with us.
We provision the environment to that plan: scheduler, storage, networking, licence integration, and security controls, validated against your real flows before handover.
We run it to an SLA, covering monitoring, scaling, burst, and tuning, and report utilisation back to your CAD and finance leads every cycle.
We only do silicon compute. That focus is the difference between a cluster that runs and a cluster that ships chips on schedule.
Tenant-isolated environments, encryption in transit and at rest, full audit trails, and data-residency controls your security team can sign off on.
Tool seats, not raw core counts, are what dominate your budget. We schedule against that, so the spend follows the work.
When the deadline is real, you reach an engineer who already knows your flow, not a first-line ticket queue reading from a script.
We work across Synopsys, Cadence, and Siemens flows on the infrastructure you choose. No lock-in to a single cloud or toolchain.
An assistant for EDA engineers that answers from the PDKs and manuals you already license, and checks the Verilog and Tcl it writes before you run it.
The PDKs and tool manuals you license, not the open internet.
Tcl constraints and Verilog are validated against the tool's documented commands and options first.
The model runs inside SEMACA. Designs, questions and answers are never sent to an outside AI service.
Use it from the portal, or from a shell in your project with a SEMACA-skinned opencode.
Never sent to an outside AI service
On-prem and in the cloud, for semiconductor and biotech teams alike. What that track record means for you:
We built and still support EnSilica's high-security HPC environment: production compute for a listed mixed-signal ASIC design house, where protecting customer IP is non-negotiable.
We've taken real workloads from over a week on a researcher's desktop to seconds on a tuned cluster. The same optimisation discipline goes into regression farms and signoff.
Delivered across owned clusters and cloud alike. Buy Dell today and HPE tomorrow; we build around your tools and your economics, with nothing that locks you in.
EnSilica have engaged Semaca LTD since 2017, during this time Semaca has done a great job of helping us to keep our IT infrastructure running smoothly and securely. They help support over 180 employees as part of our global workforce and critically facilitated the seamless migration to remote work during the COVID pandemic. They provide a blend of professionalism, flexibility, and dedication, combined with an excellent knowledge of a range of complex IT systems. Semaca have been key in helping develop and support our new generation of high-security HPC environment.
We'll profile a real job, show you where the time and licence spend goes, and size what fixing it would take. No deck required.
Prefer email or phone? sales@semaca.co.uk · +44 1344 269267
An engineer will get back to you within one business day to set up your capacity review.