Mentor Graphics

Mentor Graphics

Company type	Public
Industry	EDA, Embedded Software
Founded	1981
Founder	Tom Bruggere
Headquarters	Wilsonville, Oregon, United States 45°19′10″N 122°45′46″W
Products	Nucleus OS, EDGE Developer Suite
Revenue	$803 million USD (2009)
Net income	$22 million USD (2009)
Number of employees	4,400 (2009)
Website	mentor.com

Mentor Graphics, Inc (Nasdaq: MENT) is a US-based multinational corporation dealing in electronic design automation (EDA) for electrical engineering and electronics, as of 2004, ranked third in the EDA industry it helped create. The company, founded in 1981, is headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon, and employs 4,000 people worldwide.

History

In 1981, the idea of computer-aided design for electronics as the foundation of a company occurred to several groups - those who founded Mentor, Valid Logic Systems, and Daisy Systems. One of the main distinctions between these groups was that the founding engineers of Mentor, whose backgrounds were in software development at Tektronix, ruled out designing and manufacturing proprietary computers to run their software applications. They felt that hardware was going to become a commodity owned by big computer companies, so instead they would select an existing computer system as the hardware platform for the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) programs they would build.

By February 1981, most of the start-up team had been identified; by March, the three executive founders, Tom Bruggere, Gerry Langeler and Dave Moffenbeier had left Tektronix, and by May the business plan was complete. The first round of money, $1 million, came from Sutter Hill, Greylock, and Venrock Associates. The next round was $2 million from five venture capital firms, and in April 1983 a third round raised $7 million more. Mentor Graphics was one of the first companies to attract venture capital to Oregon.

Apollo Computer workstations were chosen as the initial hardware platform. Based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Apollo was less than a year old and had only announced itself to the public a few weeks before the founders of Mentor Graphics began their initial meetings.

When Mentor entered the CAE market the company had two technical differentiators. The first was the software - Mentor, Valid, and Daisy each had software with different strengths and weaknesses. The second was the hardware - Mentor ran all programs on the Apollo workstation, while Daisy and Valid each built their own hardware for schematic capture, but ran simulation and other programs on larger computers such as the MicroVAX.

After a frenzied development, the IDEA 1000 product was introduced at the 1982 Design Automation Conference, though in a suite and not on the floor.

By the time founder Bruggere ran for the U.S. Senate in 1996, the company had grown to annual revenues of $384 million.

Mentor Graphics is a global company with product development being done in the USA, Europe, Japan, Pakistan, India and Egypt. In keeping with global trends in software development, the company has a substantial labor force in lower cost locations such as Pakistan, India, Poland, Hungary and Egypt. James "Jim" Ready, one of the more colorful people in embedded systems, left Mentor in 1999 to form the embedded Linux company MontaVista. Neil Henderson, a pioneer in the royalty-free, source provided market space, joined Mentor Graphics in 2002 with the acquisition of Accelerated Technology Inc. Stephen Mellor, a leader in the UML space and co-originator of the Shlaer-Mellor design methodology, joined Mentor Graphics in 2004 with the acquisition of Project Technology.

As of 2010, Mentor's major competitors are Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys and Magma Design Automation.

In June 2008, Cadence Design Systems offered to acquire Mentor Graphics in a leveraged buyout. On 15 August 2008, Cadence withdrew this offer quoting an inability to raise the necessary capital and the unwillingness of Mentor Graphics' Board and management to discuss the offer. In August 2009, Mentor completed the acquisition of silicon manufacturing testing company LogicVision for $13 million in an all stock deal. Mentor completed the acquisition of Valor Computerized Systems in March 2010 in a cash and stock deal valued at $50 million.

Management

As of August 2010, Walden C. Rhines is the company's chairman of the board and chief executive officer. He started as CEO in October 1993. Gregory K. Hinckley serves as the president of the corporation and has been a corporate officer since January 1997. The chief financial officer is Maria M. Pope, who has been in that role since 2 May 2007.

Products

Entrance to company headquarters

The company distributes the following tools.

• Electronic design automation for
  • IC Layout full-custom and SDL tools such as IC Station
  • IC place and route tool: Olympus-SoC
  • IC Verification tools such as Calibre nmDRC, Calibre nmLVS, and Calibre xRC
  • Schematic editors for electronic schematics such as Design Architect IC or DxDesigner
  • Layout tools for printed circuit boards with programs such as PADS, Expedition Enterprise and Board Station
  • Component library management tools
  • IP cores for ASIC and FPGA designs
• Embedded systems Development
  • Mentor Embedded Linux
  • Real-Time Operating Systems
    • Nucleus OS (acquired in 2002 when Mentor acquired Accelerated Technology, Inc.)
    • VRTX (acquired in 1995 when Mentor bought Microtec Research.)
  • Development Tools:
    • EDGE Developer Suite - Embedded development tools IDE (compilers, debugger, profiler, project manager)
    • EDGE SimTest - Virtual Prototyping, simulation and testing for embedded solutions
    • Next Device Engine (NDE) - Next Device was acquired by Mentor in 2006.
    • xtUML Design Tools: BridgePoint (acquired in a 2004 when Mentor acquired Project Technology.)
  • VPN Solutions
    • Nucleus Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) software
    • Nucleus NET networking stack
    • Nucleus implementation of the Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE) protocol
    • Nucleus PPP software
• FPGA synthesis tools
  • Precision synthesis - Advanced RTL & physical synthesis for FPGAs
• High-level synthesis tools
  • Catapult C Synthesis for C++ to RTL synthesis
• Electrical Systems, Cabling and Harness design
  • CHS - a suite of integrated tools for the design, validation and manufacture of electrical systems and harnesses.
  • VeSys - a mid-market toolset for vehicle electrical system and harness design.
  • Logical Cable - LCable, a legacy wiring design tool.
  • TransDesign - A first generation system for the automatic synthesis of wiring designs
• Simulation tools for analog mixed-signal design
  • QuestaSim is an Advanced Verification platform supporting testbench automation, assertions and functional coverage
  • ModelSim is a popular hardware simulation and debug environment
  • Eldo is a high performance SPICE simulator
  • ADiT is a fast SPICE simulator
  • Questa ADMS is a mixed-signal verification tool
• Falcon Framework a software application framework for Apollo/Domain and Unix
  • AMPLE a scripting language for the Falcon Framework
• Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer (from the acquisition of Flomerics)
  • FloEFD, FloTHERM are used to design cooling solutions

SoC emulation/acceleration - Veloce products family enables SoC emulation and best transaction based acceleration.