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Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

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Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#21

Post by e19293001 »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #19

This 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…

I 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.

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#22

Post by davidgay »

Cyph0n wrote: post #17
nom wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

They didn't start by writing their tools for Linux, as all of these companies were founded in the eighties and started writing their software before Linux even existed...

And Mentor Graphics initially ran on Apollo machines, which were running a proprietary though somewhat Unix-like OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsys

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#23

Post by rfrank »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #19

This 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…

Agree with your sentiment, but wouldn't Cadence or Altium be better candidates than Mentor for that goal?

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#25

Post by rfrank »

nom wrote: post #12
helthanatos wrote: post #7

Earlier 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…

The PCB design team at my job almost all use Mentor Xpedition. From my experience with those guys, they would not appreciate modern software UIs in their CAD tool at all. Half of them refuse to upgrade from Windows XP because they don't see a point. If an update to Xpedition suddenly had a super clean/minimal UI someone might actually have a stroke haha.

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#26

Post by Cyph0n »

davidgay wrote: post #22
Cyph0n wrote: post #17

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 h…

They didn't start by writing their tools for Linux, as all of these companies were founded in the eighties and started writing their software before Linux even existed... And Mentor Graphics initially ran on Apollo machines, which were running a proprietary though somewhat Unix-like OS ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Desi…

I'm not familiar with the history of their tools to be frank. I was talking about their current offerings, which are as I said mostly designed to run on Linux, with Windows support added in as an afterthought - if you're lucky.

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#27

Post by abawany »

nickpsecurity wrote: post #19

This 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…

Used to work at Siemens. Their open-source policies were onerous from a consumption point-of-view. Every revision of every approved open-source product had to be reviewed by their open-source legal hawks to ensure that nothing had changed. I don't remember their mandatory training on open source but I especially don't recall any encouragement to publish open source projects and to contribute to them. Great company but it certainly treated open-source with a sentiment that I can only describe as fear.

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#28

Post by nickpsecurity »

rfrank wrote: post #23
nickpsecurity wrote: post #19

This 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…

Agree with your sentiment, but wouldn't Cadence or Altium be better candidates than Mentor for that goal?

There's pretty good HLS tools and other things to work at a high level. The real difficulty is on verification, RTL synthesis, material checks, fast simulation, etc. Altium lacks a bit of these whereas Cadence is huge. That Mentor was so tiny in market cap despite having something good for every part of the stack, even software side, made them the best buy.

I have occasionally recommended Altium to people designing new hardware just because they have a nice cost/benefit ratio. So, did Tanner on PCB's and analog. Mentor bought Tanner. Now we're back to Mentor. :)

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#29

Post by nickpsecurity »

abawany wrote: post #27
nickpsecurity wrote: post #19

This 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…

Used to work at Siemens. Their open-source policies were onerous from a consumption point-of-view. Every revision of every approved open-source product had to be reviewed by their open-source legal hawks to ensure that nothing had changed. I don't remember their mandatory training on open source but I especially don't recall any encouragement to publish open source projects and to contribute to them. Great company bu…

That's definitely bad. One of my ideas for Mentor didn't even need open-source, though. The idea was that they enabled export of some intermediate steps in RTL synthesis or optimization so customers could equivalence check them. I don't use their stuff so forgive me if they already do this & I just didn't know. Anyway, the initial, intermediate, and final RTL's could be checked both with testing and formal tools that were open-source. All the magic behind making those steps happen can remain proprietary. Likewise, do some OSS stuff for gate-level testing and material checks to run after Mentor's. Analog stuff done similarly as there's already diverse proprietary and FOSS tools for SPICE, etc.

So, they can differentiate on verifiability while still keeping the trade secrets that make them the most money. There is risk that the intermediate steps could let people reverse engineer some of the magic. However, that's low given people can already analyze their binaries when running those steps and academics [like Mentor funds] come up with better ones all the time. The next step in my Mentor-oriented plan was same buyer acquiring eASIC so the verified, hardware designs could be practically thrown into initial production at little cost. Key IP that almost everyone needs they get for free so long as they use eASIC for the HW design for X years or iterations with a fair, royalty agreement.

Interested in what people in hardware market think of these schemes?

Re: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

#30

Post by nickpsecurity »

e19293001 wrote: post #21
nickpsecurity wrote: post #19

This 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…

I 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…

Interested in your opinion on this:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=12951128

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