Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mentor-graphics-m-a-siemens-idUSKBN1390Q4

by fazkan • 10 years ago

109 40 10 years ago

reuters.com

barrkel• 10 years ago

$4.5B, not $45B.

jrwan• 10 years ago

The title is a unintentional clickbait...lol

helthanatos• 10 years ago

Funny... The title made me research the company some. I don't think I've heard of them.

pferdone• 10 years ago

chump change

raverbashing• 10 years ago

Hopefully it will not get (too much) infected by corporate red tape and inefficiencies of the parent company

fazkan2• 10 years ago

Well I work here, and its safe to assume that it was already infected...lets hope that the parent company does the opposite...

lmedinas• 10 years ago

Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...

Matthias2472• 10 years ago

And Harman even uses some of Mentors products ;)

spatulon• 10 years ago

Strange, because Siemens sold their automotive business (VDO) to Continental in 2007.

vasaulys• 10 years ago

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.

Cyph0n4• 10 years ago

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...

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

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 interests. This kind of thing happens a lot. It's to be expected. Oh well.

e19293001• 10 years ago

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.

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

Interested in your opinion on this:

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

rgovind2• 10 years ago

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

rfrank4• 10 years ago

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

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

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. :)

abawany• 10 years ago

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.

nickpsecurity6• 10 years ago

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?

pjmlp• 10 years ago

I worked at another one of the similar field and the policies were quite similar.

sguav• 10 years ago

Intel->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• 10 years ago

Alt Headline: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics for 0.15 LinkedIns, or .23 WhatsApps

frozenport• 10 years ago

Mentor graphics has revenue of 1 billion, instagram has revenue of 3 billion and maybe more growth potential.

Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

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