Between The Lines

Now that Cadence has made its big pre-DAC announcements, Mentor recently took its turn unveiling its big announcements for DAC. Mentor had two primary announcements leading up to the show and both of them are quite frankly ho hum product upgrades rather than new technology announcements. The first one announced that Mentor made its ANSI-C synthesis tool capable of full-chip synthesis.

The second one, which a Mentor PR person called "Mentor's most significant product announcement of the year," turned out to be an upgrade of Mentor's flagship product Calibre. Mentor apparently wanted me to write a giant 600 word puff piece on it, like my competitors, but quite frankly it isn't worthy.

Here in a nutshell is what Mentor announced: the new Calibre nmDRC in a 40-CPU cluster now runs a full design in less than 2 hours and has higher capacity than the older version because all the good functions in Calibre have been moved onto a new hyperscaling architecture. The new version can also perform localized fixes so you don't have to do full DRC reruns, you can simply rerun the problem areas. Oh and the new tool now supports TVF as well as SVRF.

I'm sure it isn't an easy feat reworking a tool so that it runs faster and has a higher capacity, but essentially you hear that in any and all EDA upgrade releases. So you may be asking: What, no new cool tool from Mentor? Mentor does believe this is the big one. And to Mentor it is.

Certainly the meatier story is not the technology innovations added to Calibre, it is the business story here—the importance of Calibre to Mentor. You see Mentor's Calibre has downright owned the digital ASIC and SoC DRC/LVS tool market for about six years. And Calibre today represents the largest chunk of Mentor's revenue. I'm not sure how large a percentage of Mentor' yearly revenue it represents, but I bet it is huge. But over the last year, Calibre has gained renewed competition from Cadence and Magma. Both of those companies claim Calibre's Achilles heel has been its limited capacity and performance and thus both companies introduced DRC/LVS technologies claiming better run times. Mentor with nmDRC claims to have now at least matched the run time claims of both Magma and Cadence. So the message Mentor wants you to come away with here is that Calibre is still as accurate as always and is now as fast if not faster than competing tools, so don't buy another tool.

Certainly if Calibre falters, Mentor has to transfer its flag from the Calibre battleship to its next biggest boat in its fleet—at last call that's the ModelSim/Questa mixed language simulator. How big is the Questa boat? Even if you believe VHDL's going to reemerge as the design language of the future, I bet it's big enough to ski behind but not big enough to go to war with. Mentor's going to need a bigger boat and thus a real physical design suit sooner or later. Synopsys outbid Mentor for Avanti. Magma's legal situation is likely too messy. Keep an eye on Sierra Design…