
Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal - fazkan
http://www.reuters.com/article/us-mentor-graphics-m-a-siemens-idUSKBN1390Q4
======
nickpsecurity
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.

~~~
abawany
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.

~~~
nickpsecurity
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?

------
lmedinas
Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business:
[https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-
acqui...](https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acquire-
harman-accelerating-growth-in-automotive-and-connected-technologies)

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

~~~
vasaulys
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.

~~~
veli_joza
Exactly. Siemens has already proved it can build motors for electric plane and
they could easily become major player in electric vehicle industry.

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

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

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

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

------
barrkel
$4.5B, not $45B.

~~~
jrwan
The title is a unintentional clickbait...lol

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

~~~
nom
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](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mpRF6bAY1g)

Cadence Virtuoso:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCu822wXPQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCu822wXPQ)

Synopsys Design Compiler:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvZmwWJ2FGI](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvZmwWJ2FGI)

~~~
Cyph0n
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.

~~~
davidgay
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/Domain/OS)).

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems)
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsys](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsys)

~~~
Cyph0n
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.

