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 [...]

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A friend just sent me the news link that Carl Icahn is making a bid to control Mentor Graphics with a 6.9% equity position in MENT stock. Of course that news helped boost the share price of Mentor Graphics.
What Mr. Icahn is often able to do is take over a company, place his people on [...]

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I’ve blogged about Gemini before:

October 2008
December 2008
December 2008
December 2009

In December 2009 I first heard that Gemini DA was in play by my Silicon Valley sources, then today we read in Cooley’s ESNUG that www.gemini-da.com redirects to www.synopsys.com
Their tool was yet another Parallel FastSPICE circuit simulator.
Evidently it wasn’t selling enough or different enough from the other [...]

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I’ve written before (1,2,3,4) about the success and momentum of Apache Design so it was no surprise to read in EE Times that they are positioning for an IPO.
Every quarter for the past several years I would read almost the same press release from Apache, “record sales, still profitable”. Apache is my favorite EDA poster [...]

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Paying just 2X annual revenue at $82M we learned that Mentor is acquiring a company called Valor Computerized Systems today.
This appears to be another smart move by Mentor and should pay for itself in a few years if product revenues for Valor continue to grow at historic rates. I was impressed with the Valor web [...]

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This month Virage adds 160 staff from NXP and last month they acquired ARC, another IP provider.
The NXP deal makes sense to me because Virage also receives some design services business to pay for all that new staff.
It seems like the IP business should be a product business where you can sell a qualified logic [...]

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Another month, another complimentary EDA acquisition. Forte is well-known for C synthesis and Arithmatica offers datapath synthesis. This combination has a good chance of success because:
1) Complimentary tools
2) Clear management structure (Dan Ganousis leads the US Sales team)
3) Egos checked at the door
4) Friendly acquisition
My only concerns are the time-zone differences between the UK and [...]

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This is how acquisitions in EDA are supposed to work:

Friendly, not hostile
Complementary products, not overlapping
Egos checked at the door, no whining in the press
Compatible management philosophy, clear org chart post-merger

Apache has created a handful of power and signal integrity point tools, and this acquisition will help them broaden their tool suite to include a Design [...]

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What an amazing gain we’ve seen in EDA stock prices in just the past 3 months. Magma (LAVA) doubling in price, then Mentor (MENT) increasing some 50%.
Ironically Synopsys (SNPS) has been reporting the healthiest quarterly reports yet it’s stock price has been steady and under-performing even the NASDAQ average. I expected Synopsys stock to be [...]

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This week I started a poll on eda.plaxogroups.com asking about the Mentor acqusition of LogicVision. My former Mentor co-worker David Stannard is an expert in the test world and he had a lot to say about this deal, in fact he wanted to say more than what Plaxo would allow so I’ve decided to post [...]

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