Novelda Unleashes the Power of Ultra-Wideband to Detect Human Presence Using Cadence CloudBurst on AWS

As a small but growing company of more than 80 employees, Novelda is committed to delivering innovative, technologically advanced solutions while eliminating unnecessary capital expenditures. Using the electronic design automation (EDA) tools offered by Cadence in the fully managed Cadence CloudBurst environment built on Amazon Web Services (AWS), Novelda can scale to meet its compute needs and pave the way for future growth without additional infrastructure investments.

Like Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, Ultra-Wideband (UWB) is a short-range, wireless communication protocol that uses radio waves. But unlike its counterparts, it operates at very high frequencies and, as its name denotes, across a wide spectrum.

UWB works by using a transmitter to send radio pulses across a wide frequency spectrum that are then translated into data by a UWB receiver. The same way bats use echolocation to sense their environment, UWB pulses can be used to measure the distance to remote objects. The shorter the duration of the pulse, the more precise the distance measurement will be. Because UWB uses pulses that are just a few nanoseconds long, it enables distance and location to be calculated within a few centimeters.

UWB’s highly precise ranging capabilities make a number of use cases possible, from industrial asset tracking to driverless valet parking to home-health patient monitoring. Norwegian startup Novelda uses UWB technology to deliver accurate, intelligent, and reliable sensors for human presence detection in a variety of indoor applications, including consumer electronic devices, home appliances, and smart building systems.

Novelda’s innovative single-chip solution contains a UWB impulse radar transceiver that accurately detects human presence by recognizing micro movements, including breathing and heartbeat, with high precision, low power consumption, and no impact on product design. Novelda UWB sensor chips make it possible for your laptop to sense your presence and turn on and off in response, your hotel room to automatically start and stop heating or cooling, and your home speakers to know what room you’re in—leading to an improved user experience, increased security, and reduced energy usage. “Our vision is to make life easier by creating seamless interaction between people and things,” explained Nikolaj Andersen, IC Engineering Manager at Novelda. “We want to focus our engineering team and resources on innovating and advancing our core technology, not on maintaining design tools or infrastructure.”

To design its groundbreaking chips, Novelda relies on the electronic design automation (EDA) solutions offered by Cadence, an AWS Advanced Technology Partner. Historically, Novelda has used these solutions on-premises, running them on self-hosted server hardware. But as the company grew, it became clear the infrastructure could not keep up. “We were at the point where we needed to do some upgrades, which would have required large investments in both hardware and the people required to maintain it,” said Andersen. “We also would have needed to invest in physical facilities to house that hardware safely and reliably.”

Beyond the costs of a significant infrastructure upgrade, the Novelda team was also concerned about the inability of its on-premises system to scale to meet fluctuating workload demands. “We have times of peak demand where our need for compute power and storage is very high, but there are also periods where the demand is much lower. We’d have to invest to meet those peak demands, which isn’t reasonable for an organization of our size,” Andersen said. “That’s when we learned that Cadence has a fully managed cloud solution ideal for use cases like ours.”

To help companies like Novelda meet the steady-state and peak high-performance computing (HPC) demands of a productive design infrastructure without compromising CapEx efficiency—something particularly important to a growing business—Cadence offers Cadence CloudBurst, an EDA-optimized platform built on AWS. Designed for compute-intensive, all-cloud and hybrid-cloud environments, CloudBurst provides fast and easy access to Cadence design tools and industry-leading process design kits (PDKs) in an ISO security-certified platform built on AWS.

"By partnering with AWS, we’ve been able to access nearly unlimited resources as well as a wider range of machine variety to better meet the scalability and flexibility needs of EDA tools at every stage of the design process,” said Peter Hansson, Senior Account Executive at Cadence. “Because Cadence CloudBurst is a ready-to-use platform and our experts handle all the required integrations, the solution was up and running at Novelda in only a few days.”

Since moving to CloudBurst, Novelda has seen a substantial improvement in the overall robustness of its compute environment. “The availability of the AWS infrastructure has been great,” noted Andersen. “I don't think we've had any downtime, and for us to achieve that on-premises would have required major investments in hardware and people.”

CloudBurst supports AWS High Performance Compute instance families, including Amazon Elastic Compute Cloud (Amazon EC2), which Novelda uses. With EC2, Novelda has access to the on-demand infrastructure and capacity it needs to run computationally intense workloads and easily scale compute power without additional capital expenditures. “CloudBurst enables us to linearly scale capacity for storage and compute according to our needs, without big up-front expenditures,” Andersen said. “Whenever we need extra space, we just add a few more gigabytes and we're done. The alternative would be buying and setting up new hardware ourselves, which is a lot more work, a lot more expensive, and comes with downtime.”

CloudBurst also supports Novelda’s close collaboration with Cadence Design Services, Cadence’s team of technology experts dedicated to helping clients optimize their designs without compromising performance or scheduling goals. “With CloudBurst, our consultants can work with Novelda’s engineers as if they were together on-premises. The combined CloudBurst–AWS solution enables an efficient workflow in a secure environment that can support any fast-growing company,” explained Hansson.

Similarly, CloudBurst makes remote work smoother and more secure, something that was particularly key during the pandemic and that continues to be important given Novelda’s distributed and hybrid workforce. Cadence has also invested in AWS and third-party security services and adopted industry best practices to attain ISO 27001 and 27017 security certifications for the benefit of its customers.

Going forward, Andersen sees Cadence and AWS as key partners in achieving Novelda’s ambitious growth goals. “We're a small organization, and we need to spend our time and energy on advancing our technology, not worrying about tools and infrastructure. As we add bigger projects and more people, we are confident that with this current experience, it will be easy for us to scale up and get access to the compute power we need. This offering of CloudBurst on AWS that allows us to utilize the right compute for each job just makes sense and is invaluable for our business.”

“Cadence is a really good fit for us,” Andersen concluded. “We avoid a lot of the risks and costs of doing this ourselves and position our company for future success.”