The addition of Future Facilities’ technologies and expertise will support the Cadence Intelligent System Design strategy and help companies designing data centres, as well as handling operations and lifecycle management to reduce these centres’ carbon footprint.
Future Facilities’ product portfolio includes an electronics thermal solution that augments Cadence’s Celsius Thermal Solver, as well as computational fluid dynamics (CFD) electronics cooling simulation technology that optimises the performance and cooling efficiency of data centres.
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 centre prior to implementation and during operations.
Future Facilities’ technologies are used by 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, 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 can simulate 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, as well as improving data centre 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 maximize capacity, improve energy efficiency, reduce costs and mitigate critical infrastructure risk.”
Future Facilities’ 6Sigma Digital Twin simulation and optimisation platform closely monitors 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 technologies are seen as enabling Cadence to provide more comprehensive chip, package, PCB and system data centre solutions.
“Using advanced CFD brings tremendous benefits when analysing 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 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.”
