31–40 of 42 posts
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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
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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 n…
It would be cool to see them open up access to their tools somehow though; Library Manager, Valor DFM, maybe even something like HyperLynx. Not sure how open people would be to some sort of royalty agreement in exchange for access to CAD tools.
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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.
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…
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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 n…
That makes sense. Rightly or wrongly, I perceive Mentor as having lots of users who cater to companies in industries like telecom, medical, or A&D who aren't very pro-FOSS (on a corporate level, at least). It would be cool to see them open up access to their tools somehow though; Library Manager, Valor DFM, maybe even something like HyperLynx. Not sure how open people would be to some sort of royalty agreement in exc…
Alt Headline: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics for 0.15 LinkedIns, or .23 WhatsApps
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…
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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.
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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…
Why 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
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.