MENT's main competitors are SNPS and CDN
As far as quality and downright business savy, Synopsys
holds the edge of all three. As far as tools, Synopsys
beat out Mentor and Cadence in Synthesis. I used Mentor's Autologic
in 1995 and it sucked. I was using VHDL. I ended up having to
recode most of my portion of the chip because Autologic
was very bad. ie instead of a 8 to one multiplexor that
is a hard component from the ASIC vendor, it created a string of
2 to 1 muxes. The bad thing about this was that it made the paths
very long and took more area. And that wasn't the only thing it
didn't do right. Autologic had a hard time with 7 or more pages of VHDL code. I ended up breaking them into 2 or more components.
However, to be fair to MENT, I heard from other designers that Autologic did improve their program quite abit
shortly after. As far as simulators, I like Mentor's VHDL
simulators the best. They bought Model Tech and I really loved
using the tools. As far as verilog, I have used and am using
Cadence Verilog now. I have used Synopsys VCS too. VCS is very fast!
I used Synopsys VSS simulator (VHDL) - it sucked. It was slower, the gui was harder to use than Mentor's. Static timing analysis,
Synopsys is champs here again. They combine an old rival Motive
with PrimeTime. Motive will be going away and its technology
will be going into Prime Time. mentor has some cool
parasitic extractance tools. These tool obtain more precise information about capacitance, resistance, and inductance. These are the things that enable more accurate circuit simulations.
Synopsys is also strong there due to EPIC tools. But I have heard very good things about Mentor's tools. One thing to point out about Cadence, Cadence is big in support. the biggest. Their Spectrum
services group has been growing at almost twice as fast as Cadence's corporate rate. They were growing at 70+%. Cadence is stronger in service than Synopsys and Mentor. This I suppose is an oversight on
Synopsys' and Cadence's part. There 's lots of money to be made in
contract and Turn key services.
As far as Mentor's aggressive take over, I'm for it! Quickturn
execs are only looking to cover their golden parachutes! They don't care what is best for the customers or the shareholders. mentor's offer was and is very fair - almost a 50% premium for a stock that was still declining just prior to the initial bid.
These golden parachutes are designed to make sure that even if the
board is fired (as is proposed), they will still walk away with millions of dollars or if they stay they know they don't have to try to find another job that pays $500,000+ per year. So as far as Quickturn, it's a quick buck that they want. Cheers to Mentor!
The above opinion is my own and I am not making a recommendation
to either buy or sell any of the stocks mentioned in this post. It
is the ultimate responsibility of the trader/investor to make their own choice. |
