Wally Rhines gives an overview of 12 months and 12 acquisitions

I prefer attending the Mentor party on Monday because I can actually hear what people are saying, as opposed to attending the Denali party where speech is barely possible with 120db music blaring non-stop. We boarded a bus from the convention center and were brought to Disneyland for appetizers and a fine meal.

On the bus I met Paul Thomas, research analyst for Bank of America, Merrill Lynch. We chatted about Carl Icahn and his motivations for buying 7+% of MENT stock in an attempt to shake up the company, place a member on the board of directors or just convince them to sell the company. People at Mentor are kind of waiting for Carl Icahn to make his demands known but then just carry on business in the EDA world.

Robert Stear, Director of Design Enablement at Global Foundries brought me up to date on how the AMD fab spin-out is doing in the marketplace and how they develop a common process with IBM and Samsung. I found it interesting that these fab folks can collaborate on process development while in the foundry market place they are trying to serve the same customers in a competitive environment.

Samir Chaudry, Director of Design Enablement at Tower Jazz told me how they support iPDKs but that most of their customers still want to use Cadence Pcells for analog and mixed-signal IC designs.

Wally Rhines did speak for a few minutes before dinner started about what’s been happening at Mentor over the past twelve months with something like 12 company and technology acquisitions. The investments and diversity of tool categories seems to be working for Mentor as their EDA tool revenues now surpass those of Cadence (but you have to exclude EDA services).

John Cooley of ESNUG fame was in attendance and his email newsletter continues to be very popular in the EDA industry because of the quality of user-contributed articles and banter are hand-picked and focused on specific tool user experiences. The DAC trip report summary he assembles would be more potent if published in July, so let’s see what happens this year.

Uday Kapoor of Sun Microsystems (Oracle) knew co-worker Aaron Barker who will be a panelist on my SPICE panel in the pavillion on Tuesday at 4:30PM. Rob Mains, Director of Product Technology Group Microelectronics was another Sun veteran who spent the last 10 years at the company and attended the dinner party.

Over dinner I sat near Robert Hum, GM and VP of the DSM Division and talked about the last 20 years in EDA in terms of tools, users and technology trends.

At the conclusion of dinner we were all invited to watch the spectacular fireworks show at Disneyland, completely synchronized with music and storyline. This was certainly the most sophisticated fireworks display that I’ve ever seen, and I was stunned to see just how popular Disneyland Resort was even at 11PM on a Monday night in June, they certainly have a compelling entertainment value that is simply booming in spite of a recession.

Thank you Mentor for another classy evening at DAC.