I think I’m the last to pick up on this
Personally I like Wally Rhines presentations about EDA and the anarchist in me is rooting for the small guy. But I think everyone is overlooking Mentor’s system-level design flows.
Having a history in a System Level EDA company, it does seem to me that Catapult has quite a bit of ESL traction. As far as DFM goes, I’m still undecided about it – I heard that DFM crews were laid off in Cadence earlier. My opinion is that Cadence is going all-out on the “All You Can Eat Buffet” theory. This way it gets a load of verification tools (0-In, OVM/SystemVerilog) and readymade traction in design companies like ST, which are heavy on Synopsys.
In addition, Synopsys did this weird Synplicity thinggy, and I think Cadence needed a FPGA/DSP counterbalance.
If I was a betting man, I would say that DFT/DFM would be a few rungs down in the spin sheet. But yes, I would say it is safe to keep the DFM card under the pillow in case the oft-rumored Cadence sellout does happen (as Sramana points out, maybe to TSMC)
However, what will be the most interesting aspect of all this is the poison pill that Wally and Co. will almost definitely try to create – quite similar to what Jerry Yang conceived, which actually incentivizes employees to leave the company and claim substantial benefits and golden handshakes citing “unsurmountable change in work conditions”, in case of a takeover.
Mentor’s stock price shows a play of +/- 20%, whereas Cadence has taken a dip of 50% since July 2007. Cadence’s marketing guys will have to come up with some lines equally convincing for this deal to happen.
4 Comments
personally, I’m up for the acquisition..the industry is not growing and there are too many players..it needs some consolidation….whether the consolidation hurts the tech advancement is a different question…I would anticipate mentor might acquire or merge with another significant eda player to avoid this and emerge stronger …that would be good …cadence can then acquire another netlist-gdsII company which will put in spot light and can be in competing position again…
>cadence can then acquire another netlist-gdsII ?company
ahhhh… wink wink…let me see, how many netlist-to-gds2 companies do I know of
Cadence is in trouble. There innovation pipeline is dried up and its contract renewal time and customers are not renewing contracts. That ship is sinking fast. Mentor is on the other hand growing and out innovating the other 2 big players.
I’m rooting for Mentor and a competitive and let’s not create another un innovative Microsoft like dry spell in EDA.
“Out innovating” is a pretty strong word. As Sramana Mitra pointed out in one of her earlier posts (http://sramanamitra.com/2007/12/28/mentor-graphics-lbo-recommended/) – Mentor is’nt sitting pretty on its revenues.
It’s yahoo finance charts are showing too much of a see-saw to predict exactly what the market is thinking.
As far as your fear of a dry-spell goes, I’m with u on that one – I have some “theoretical” basis for that fear (http://sandeep.wordpress.com/2008/06/21/eda-duopoly-one-too-many/)