  Increasingly, business opportunities available to fabless design teams in the
semiconductor industry far exceed those addressable with on-prem compute
resources. An attractive option to capture these electronic design automation
(EDA) design opportunities is through public cloud bursting. However, security
concerns with public cloud bursting arise from having to protect process design
kits, third party intellectual property, and new design data for semiconductor
devices and chips. One way to address security concerns for public cloud
bursting is to leverage confidential containers for EDA workloads. Confidential
containers add zero trust computing elements to significantly reduce the
probability of intellectual property escapes. A key concern that often follows
security discussions is whether EDA workload performance will suffer with
confidential computing. In this work we demonstrate a full set of EDA
confidential containers and their deployment and characterize performance
impacts of confidential elements of the flow including storage and networking.
A complete end-to-end confidential container-based EDA workload exhibits 7.13%
and 2.05% performance overheads over bare-metal container and VM based
solutions, respectively.
