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.
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.
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?
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.
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
The other problem that I noticed is buyers are extremely risk-adverse about synthesis tools. They dont want to pay that mask fee to get broken chips in return. No more than necessary anyway. They were picky even about offerings from Big 3 when I last looked where behavioral was almost always Design Compiler, RTL almost always same product, and most using Mentor for material check. Id see different mixes on occasion but most stuck with what seemed to work for quite a few people.
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.
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. :)
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 exchange for access to CAD tools.
That last part will need some market research. eASIC already seems to do it for silicon. Quite a few vendors in embedded do for their side. There's at least potential HW upstart would want a pile of tooling at zero cost in exchange for a percentage of operating profits they get from it.
Definitely true, seems like it would depend pretty heavily on what's being made & at what scale (as if that isn't true for all mfg haha). Something that takes a few PCBs and needs bare boards, assembly, system integration, packaging, shipping, etc etc, could make a percentage of profits challenging. Makes sense to me for embedded because they're after platform adoption as well.
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.
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.
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:
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.
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.
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.
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).
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.
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
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.
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.