Are Mentor and Sierra announcing a merger on Monday?

The folks at Mentor Graphics just issued a press advisory that the company is holding a webcast press conference at 5:30AM on Monday (before NASDAQ opens). The buzz for the last few weeks has been that Mentor is in talks to acquire their partner RTL to GDSII tool vendor Sierra Design Automation.

Last year I wrote a blog post advising folks to keep an eye on the partnership. Then last month rumors started to fly that the companies were going to merge. When I questioned officials shortly after the rumors began to fly, officials at both companies declined to comment but didn’t deny it either.

If it’s true, the P&R space will now seemingly have 4 significant competitors and Mentor will have what appears to be a formidable RTL-to-GDSII system to fill out its flow…who says EDA is dead?