Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...
Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
11–20 of 42 posts
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#12Earlier quoted context omitted.
The title is a unintentional clickbait...lol
Funny... The title made me research the company some. I don't think I've heard of them.
Only 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
Cadence Virtuoso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCu822wXPQ
Synopsys Design Compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvZmwWJ2FGI
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#13Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny... The title made me research the company some. I don't think I've heard of them.
I 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
Yes, 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.
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#14Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...
And Harman even uses some of Mentors products ;)
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#15Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...
Strange, because Siemens sold their automotive business (VDO) to Continental in 2007.
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#16Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny... The title made me research the company some. I don't think I've heard of them.
Only 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…
It'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.
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#17Earlier quoted context omitted.
Funny... The title made me research the company some. I don't think I've heard of them.
Only 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…
It'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.
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#18Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...
Strange, because Siemens sold their automotive business (VDO) to Continental in 2007.
I think times were a bit different then. People are bracing for a major change to the automotive business between autonomous driving and electric cars.
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#19This 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.
Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal
#20Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...
One 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/acti...