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Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
- barrkel 10y ago$4.5B, not $45B.
- jrwan 10y agoThe title is a unintentional clickbait...lol
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- helthanatos 10y agoFunny... The title made me research the company some. I don't think I've heard of them.
- Cyph0n 10y agoThey are very well known in the electronics design industry. The other two major players in EDA are Cadence and Synopsys.
- scandox 10y agoI ran into them trying to get Toolchains for some weird pseudo-proprietary Linux distro that Intel was foisting on a project we did in conjunction with them
- Matthias247 10y agoYes, they provide embedded linux distributions. However I wouldn't wonder if these would be discontinued after the purchase, as they might not be what Siemens considers the core business of Mentor. Which is EDA tools I guess.
- rgovind 10y agoI have a feeling Mentor had a finger in my pies. EDA, Embedded, automotive, compilers, PCB and what not. I feel Synopsys and Cadence are more focused.
- joezydeco 10y agoMentor bought, and then killed, CodeSourcery. They had a great ARM/gcc toolchain but no more.
- fazkan 10y agoRight, now they sell it with nucleus, on which I work......its safe to say that they had great toolchain, now there are better options available...
- nom 10y agoOnly few people have contact with their product, but if you have to work with hardware description languages like VHDL or Verilog or want to design a chip, you will be very familiar with them. I think Mentor dominates the market together with Cadence and Synopsis. The tools used for chip design are so incredibly complex, it's impossible to build a competing product without decades of experience and development. What I find interesting is that tools like ModelSim don't look like modern software, the UI was never changed because it's not important. Examples: Mentor Modelsim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mpRF6bAY1g https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mpRF6bAY1g Cadence Virtuoso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCu822wXPQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCu822wXPQ Synopsys Design Compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvZmwWJ2FGI https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvZmwWJ2FGI
- manyxcxi 10y agoIt's funny- I grew up in Portland with my dad working for Sequent (they built some pretty cool servers back in the day). We had stacks of various Cadence CDs sitting around in the home office growing up. Mentor Graphics has a huge presence here and pretty much everyone over the age of 35 in the Portland tech scene has worked for them or Intel at some point. One of my business partners worked there for at least a decade when I was in diapers. After IBM bought Sequent (a few years between events) my dad worked at Synopsys (also in the Portland area) for quite a while. To me, it's just always been, yeah Cadence, Mentor, Synopsys- no big deal. Then when someone freaks out because I have access to some of the tools or their eyes roll back and their look goes blank I remember that they are wildly specific companies that mean nothing to like 95% of the people I have ever met. EDIT: To bring it back full circle in a way no on else cares about: Nike wound up buying/taking control of the old Sequent campus after IBM bought them. Shortly after I had my first child I found myself working on a tech project as a partner with Nike in my dad's old building, on his old floor, in generally the same area and I had a kind of weird mental moment.
- Cyph0n 10y agoIt's important to note that most if not all of these tools are written for Linux first. You would usually have a local server running the tools which you'd then SSH into and use X11 forwarding to get the GUI. Interestingly, most of these tools can be fully automated and operated from the command line using Tcl (Mentor), or even a custom scripting language like Cadence's OCEAN. I personally found Cadence Virtuoso to have above average UX, but I do agree that the GUI looks slightly dated.
- pferdone 10y agochump change
- raverbashing 10y agoHopefully it will not get (too much) infected by corporate red tape and inefficiencies of the parent company
- fazkan 10y agoWell I work here, and its safe to assume that it was already infected...lets hope that the parent company does the opposite...
- lmedinas 10y agoAlso related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acquire-harman-accelerating-growth-in-automotive-and-connected-technologies https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...
- Matthias247 10y agoAnd Harman even uses some of Mentors products ;)
- spatulon 10y agoStrange, because Siemens sold their automotive business (VDO) to Continental in 2007.
- vasaulys 10y agoI think times were a bit different then. People are bracing for a major change to the automotive business between autonomous driving and electric cars.
- veli_joza 10y agoExactly. Siemens has already proved it can build motors for electric plane and they could easily become major player in electric vehicle industry.
- Cyph0n 10y agoOne of their more interesting products is a ANC (active noise control) chip for use in commercial vehicles [1]. I have yet to see a working demo of it in the wild, but they claim that it works. Their solution requires sensors installed on the engine block on top of the microphones installed in the cabin. [1]: https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/xse-automotive/active-noise-control https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/xse-automotive/acti...
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThis isn't good news. One of my ideas for open, secure hardware involved a partial or whole acquisition of Mentor by a company that was pro-FOSS. Then, the product lines would be tweaked for easy verification. Plus deals for hardware startups that got them the tools cheap to free early on with guaranteed revenue for Mentor if successful. Now, one of the Big 3 of EDA is in the hands of a large corporation far from our interests. This kind of thing happens a lot. It's to be expected. Oh well.
- e19293001 10y agoI agree. It's disappointing to see a news like this. Mentor Graphics did a really great job on their verification tutorials that had done a great benefit to my career. I'm not sure Synopsys is winning the competition though. I just hope some great startup would emerge that's willing to support FOSS or rather some group of people willing to put their effort in creating the next generation and yet competitive and free EDA tools that I'll be interested to join.
- nickpsecurity 10y agoInterested in your opinion on this: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951128 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951128
- rgovind 10y agoWhy would this happen given that semiconductor industry itself is shrinking? I used to work in EDA until recently, but since money in semiconductor is dwindling, people like me have no interest in pursuing ideas in EDA
- nickpsecurity 10y agoThe other problem that I noticed is buyers are extremely risk-adverse about synthesis tools. They dont want to pay that mask fee to get broken chips in return. No more than necessary anyway. They were picky even about offerings from Big 3 when I last looked where behavioral was almost always Design Compiler, RTL almost always same product, and most using Mentor for material check. Id see different mixes on occasion but most stuck with what seemed to work for quite a few people. I think an EDA startup doing these things might have to prove itself with industrial-grade, academic projects first just to get some proof it works. Then, it will get a small slice of a shrinking pie that requires solving a pile of NP-hard problems in a patent minefield. I'm surprised at how many get funded to begin with.
- sguav 10y agoIntel->Altera, Siemens->Mentor, It'll be interesting to check Siemens' Modelsim - Intel edition and to see if they will eventually move to Qt for the GUI!
- valarauca1 10y agoAlt Headline: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics for 0.15 LinkedIns, or .23 WhatsApps
- frozenport 10y agoMentor graphics has revenue of 1 billion, instagram has revenue of 3 billion and maybe more growth potential.