GateRocket is on a roll after raising another $3M last week in VC funding.
Dave Orecchio is the CEO and I remember working for him at Viewlogic in the hey-days of the 90’s.
This company is focused on helping FGPA designers that need to speed up their verification and debug cycles for big designs.
RocketDrive is a hardware [...]

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A picture is worth a thousand words, at least to an engineer like me so let’s see what happened in the past 3 months:

EDA Stocks, August 23, 2008

Mentor is up about 10%, Synopsys down about 16%, Magma down about 18%, finally Cadence down some 30%. Clearly our industry is hurting with three of the top [...]

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I had to laugh out loud when I read the press release where Cadence blames Mentor for their own failed bid.
Even more laughable was Mentor’s feigned “shock” at Cadence withdrawing their hostile bid. I’m 100% certain that there is joy and partying going on at Mentor in Wilsonville as I type these words.
I blogged earlier [...]

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Two titans in the IP industry, Rambus and MIPS both announced layoffs because of a slower economy. Not so long ago I remember these two leading IP companies growing at double-digit rates, ouch.
Let’s hope that these two companies continue to invest in R&D and create new “star IP” to bring their sales back to former [...]

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Cadence stock fell some 30% today after Michael Fister talked about lower sales and earnings than expected according to an article in the Oregonian . Here’s my favorite analyst quote:
Terence Whalen, a Citigroup analyst, asked Fister whether he was the right person to continue leading Cadence, given the company’s “deterioration,” its sudden switch to a [...]

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Mentor’s latest cash offer was accepted today by the board at Flomerics.
It’s likely that the Flomerics CEO and vocal staff will not make the transition into Mentor.
I can see how the Mentor sales team could sell the Electronics Cooling tools, maybe even some of the Engineering Fluid Dynamics tools, but not the Building Heating and [...]

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Mentor just extended their cash offer to buy Flomerics at a value of just 1.2X historic revenue, however they still don’t want to be acquired. Good for them!
Let’s see if Autodesk comes to the rescue of Flomerics.
Flomerics has only one niche product for PCB designers and the rest of their product line is outside of [...]

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I guess that my title sums up the strategic blunder that Cadence is making in their bid for Mentor Graphics.
So, why is this such a big mistake for Cadence and the EDA industry?

Product overlap - a successful acquisition has a complement of products, not extreme overlap. Both companies have tools that overlap in the following [...]

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Bad News
Mentor - Lost $0.30/share on revenue of $179.2M with estimates of Q2 revenue at $173M and a loss of $0.23/share. Q1 is historically Mentor’s weakest quarter plus they exited the IP business.
Good News
Synopsys - Earned $0.27/share on revenue of $324.6M with estimates for next quarter at $343M on the top end. The strong EDA [...]

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