Siemens EDA is a US-based

electronic design automation Electronic design automation (EDA), also referred to as electronic computer-aided design (ECAD), is a category of software tools for designing Electronics, electronic systems such as integrated circuits and printed circuit boards. The tools wo ...

(EDA)

multinational corporation A multinational company (MNC), also referred to as a multinational enterprise (MNE), a transnational enterprise (TNE), a transnational corporation (TNC), an international corporation or a stateless corporation with subtle but contrasting senses, i ...

for

electrical engineering Electrical engineering is an engineering discipline concerned with the study, design, and application of equipment, devices, and systems which use electricity, electronics, and electromagnetism. It emerged as an identifiable occupation in the l ...

and

electronics The field of electronics is a branch of physics and electrical engineering that deals with the emission, behaviour and effects of electrons using electronic devices. Electronics uses active devices to control electron flow by amplification ...

, headquartered in Wilsonville,

Oregon Oregon () is a U.S. state, state in the Pacific Northwest region of the Western United States. The Columbia River delineates much of Oregon's northern boundary with Washington (state), Washington, while the Snake River delineates much of it ...

. Founded in 1981 as Mentor Graphics, the company was acquired by

Siemens Siemens AG ( ) is a German multinational conglomerate corporation and the largest industrial manufacturing company in Europe headquartered in Munich with branch offices abroad. The principal divisions of the corporation are ''Industry'', '' ...

in 2017. The company distributes products that assist in

, simulation tools for analog mixed-signal design,

VPN A virtual private network (VPN) extends a private network across a public network and enables users to send and receive data across shared or public networks as if their computing devices were directly connected to the private network. The be ...

solutions, and

fluid dynamics In physics and engineering, fluid dynamics is a subdiscipline of fluid mechanics that describes the flow of fluids— liquids and gases. It has several subdisciplines, including ''aerodynamics'' (the study of air and other gases in motion) an ...

and heat transfer tools. The company leveraged

Apollo Computer Apollo Computer Inc., founded in 1980 in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, by William Poduska (a founder of Prime Computer) and others, developed and produced Apollo/Domain workstations in the 1980s. Along with Symbolics and Sun Microsystems, Apollo ...

workstations to differentiate itself within the

computer-aided engineering Computer-aided engineering (CAE) is the broad usage of computer software to aid in engineering analysis tasks. It includes , , , durability and optimization. It is included with computer-aided design (CAD) and computer-aided manufacturing (CAM) ...

(CAE) market with its

software Software is a set of computer programs and associated documentation and data. This is in contrast to hardware, from which the system is built and which actually performs the work. At the lowest programming level, executable code consists ...

and hardware.

History

Siemens EDA was founded as Mentor Graphics in 1981 by Tom Bruggere, Gerry Langeler, and Dave Moffenbeier, all formerly of

Tektronix Tektronix, Inc., historically widely known as Tek, is an American company best known for manufacturing test and measurement devices such as oscilloscopes, logic analyzers, and video and mobile test protocol equipment. Originally an independent ...

. The company raised $55 million in funding through an initial public offering in 1984. Mentor initially wrote software that ran only in

Apollo Apollo, grc, Ἀπόλλωνος, Apóllōnos, label=genitive , ; , grc-dor, Ἀπέλλων, Apéllōn, ; grc, Ἀπείλων, Apeílōn, label=Arcadocypriot Greek, ; grc-aeo, Ἄπλουν, Áploun, la, Apollō, la, Apollinis, label= ...

workstations. 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. By the late 1980s, all EDA companies abandoned proprietary hardware in favor of workstations manufactured by companies such as Apollo and Sun Microsystems.

After a frenzied development, the IDEA 1000 product was introduced at the 1982

Design Automation Conference The Design Automation Conference, or DAC, is an annual event, a combination of a technical conference and a trade show, both specializing in electronic design automation (EDA). DAC is the oldest and largest conference in EDA, started in 1964. ...

, though in a suite and not on the floor. Mentor Graphics was purchased by

in 2017. The name was retired in 2021 and renamed Siemens EDA.

Acquisitions

Timeline

* In June 2008, Cadence Design Systems offered to acquire Mentor Graphics in a

leveraged buyout A leveraged buyout (LBO) is one company's acquisition of another company using a significant amount of borrowed money (leverage) to meet the cost of acquisition. The assets of the company being acquired are often used as collateral for the loan ...

. 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 February 2011, activist investor

Carl Icahn Carl Celian Icahn (; born February 16, 1936) is an American financier. He is the founder and controlling shareholder of Icahn Enterprises, a public company and diversified conglomerate holding company based in Sunny Isles Beach. Icahn takes l ...

offered to buy the company for about $1.86 billion in cash. *In November 2016, Mentor Graphics announced that it was to be acquired by

for $4.5 billion, at $37.25 per share, a 21% premium on Mentor's closing price on the previous Friday. The acquisition was completed in March 2017. Mentor Graphics started to operate as "Mentor, a Siemens Business". Under the terms of the acquisition, Mentor Graphics kept its headquarters in Wilsonville with workforce intact, and operated as an independent subsidiary. *In January 2021, Mentor became a division of Siemens and was renamed as Siemens EDA.

Locations

Mentor product development was located in the US, Taiwan, Egypt, Poland, Hungary, Japan, France, Canada, Pakistan, UK, Armenia, India and Russia.

Products

Mentor offered the following tools:

Electronic design automation

Integrated circuit layout Integrated circuit layout, also known IC layout, IC mask layout, or mask design, is the representation of an integrated circuit in terms of planar geometric shapes which correspond to the patterns of metal, oxide, or semiconductor layers that make ...

full-custom and

schematic-driven layout Schematic driven layout is the concept in integrated circuit layout Integrated circuit layout, also known IC layout, IC mask layout, or mask design, is the representation of an integrated circuit in terms of planar geometric shapes which correspo ...

(SDL) tools such as ''IC Station'' or ''Memory Builder'', a first industry tool for rapid embedded memory design that helped to develop single- or dual-port RAMs (synchronous and asynchronous), as well as diffusion and metal read only memories (ROM) *IC

place and route Place and route is a stage in the design of printed circuit boards, integrated circuits, and field-programmable gate arrays. As implied by the name, it is composed of two steps, placement and routing. The first step, placement, involves decidi ...

tool: ''Aprisa'' *IC Verification tools such as ''Calibre nmDRC'', ''Calibre nmLVS'', ''Calibre xRC, Calibre xACT 3D'' * IC Design for Manufacturing tools such as'' Calibre LFD, Calibre YieldEnhancer, Calibre,'' and ''YieldAnalyzer'' *

Schematic capture Schematic capture or schematic entry is a step in the design cycle of electronic design automation (EDA) at which the electronic diagram, or electronic schematic of the designed electronic circuit is created by a designer. This is done interactiv ...

editors for

electronic schematic A circuit diagram (wiring diagram, electrical diagram, elementary diagram, electronic schematic) is a graphical representation of an electrical circuit. A pictorial circuit diagram uses simple images of components, while a schematic diagram sh ...

s such as ''Xpedition Designer'' *

Layout Layout may refer to: * Page layout, the arrangement of visual elements on a page ** Comprehensive layout (comp), a proposed page layout presented by a designer to their client * Layout (computing), the process of calculating the position of obj ...

and design tools for

printed circuit board A printed circuit board (PCB; also printed wiring board or PWB) is a medium used in Electrical engineering, electrical and electronic engineering to connect electronic components to one another in a controlled manner. It takes the form of a L ...

s with programs such as ''PADS'', ''Xpedition Layout'', ''HyperLynx'' and ''Valor NPI'' *Component library management tools *

IP core In electronic design, a semiconductor intellectual property core (SIP core), IP core, or IP block is a reusable unit of logic, cell, or integrated circuit layout design that is the intellectual property of one party. IP cores can be licensed to ...

s for ASIC and FPGA designs

Embedded systems

*Mentor Embedded Linux for ARM, MIPS, Power, and x86 architecture processors *

Real-time operating system A real-time operating system (RTOS) is an operating system (OS) for real-time applications that processes data and events that have critically defined time constraints. An RTOS is distinct from a time-sharing operating system, such as Unix, which m ...

s: ** Nucleus OS (acquired in 2002 when Mentor acquired Accelerated Technology, Inc.) ** VRTX (acquired in 1995 when Mentor bought Microtec Research) * AUTOSAR implementation: **Embedded implementation VSTAR in part acquired from Mecel in 2013 **Configuration tooling Volcano Vehicle Systems Builder (VSB) *Development Tools: **Sourcery CodeBench and Sourcery GNU toolchains (acquired in 2010 when Mentor acquired CodeSourcery) **

Inflexion UI In linguistic morphology, inflection (or inflexion) is a process of word formation in which a word is modified to express different grammatical categories such as tense, case, voice, aspect, person, number, gender, mood, animacy, and defi ...

- (Next Device was acquired by Mentor in 2006) ** xtUML Design Tools: BridgePoint (acquired in 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

* Precision Synthesis - Advanced RTL & physical synthesis for FPGAs

Electrical systems, cabling, and harness

*Capital - 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

Simulation

ModelSim ModelSim is a multi-language environment by Siemens (previously developed by Mentor Graphics,) for simulation of hardware description languages such as VHDL, Verilog and SystemC, and includes a built-in C debugger.

is a hardware simulation and debug environment primarily targeted at smaller ASIC and FPGA design *QuestaSim is a simulator with advanced debug capabilities targeted at complex FPGA's and SoC's. QuestaSim can be used by users who have experience with ModelSim as it shares most of the common debug features and capabilities. One of the main differences between QuestaSim and Modelsim (besides performance/capacity) is that QuestaSim is the simulation engine for the Questa Platform which includes integration of Verification Management, Formal based technologies, Questa Verification IP, Low Power Simulation and Accelerated Coverage Closure technologies. QuestaSim natively supports SystemVerilog for Testbench, UPF, UCIS, OVM/ UVM where ModelSim does not. *

Eldo Eldo is a given name is a variation of Eldho and may refer to the following people People *Eldo Abraham, Indian politician * Eldo T. Ridgway (1880–1955), American physician and politician Fictional characters *''Eldo Davip'',a fictional soldie ...

is a

SPICE A spice is a seed, fruit, root, bark, or other plant substance primarily used for flavoring or coloring food. Spices are distinguished from herbs, which are the leaves, flowers, or stems of plants used for flavoring or as a garnish. Spices a ...

simulator *Xpedition AMS is a virtual lab for

mechatronic Mechatronics engineering also called mechatronics, is an interdisciplinary branch of engineering that focuses on the integration of mechanical, electrical and electronic engineering systems, and also includes a combination of robotics, electroni ...

system design and analysis *ADiT is a Fast-SPICE simulator *Questa ADMS is a mixed-signal verification tool

Emulation

* The Veloce product family enables SoC emulation and transaction-based acceleration.

Mechanical design

*Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer tools: **Simcenter Flotherm is a

Computational Fluid Dynamics Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a branch of fluid mechanics that uses numerical analysis and data structures to analyze and solve problems that involve fluid flows. Computers are used to perform the calculations required to simulate th ...

tool dedicated to electronics cooling using parameterized ‘SmartParts’ for common electronic components such as fans, heatsinks, and IC packages **Simcenter Flotherm XT is an electronics cooling CFD tool incorporating a solid modeler for manipulating MCAD parts. **Simcenter FLOEFD is a ‘design concurrent’ CFD tool for use in early-stage product design and is embedded within MCAD systems such as Solidworks, Creo Elements/Pro, CATIA V5 and Siemens NX *Thermal Characterization and Thermal Interface Material (TIM) Measurement equipment: **Simcenter T3STER is a hardware product that embodies an implementation of the JEDEC JESD51-1 standard for IC package thermal characterization and is compliant with JESD51-14 for Rth-JC measurement **Simcenter TERALED provides automation of the CIE 127:2007 standard providing total flux, chromaticity and correlated color temperature (CCT) for power LEDs. With T3Ster it provides thermal resistance metrics for LEDs based on the real dissipated heating power. **Simcenter DYNTIM extends T3Ster, providing a dynamic thermal test station for thermal conductivity measurements of thermal interface materials (TIMs),

thermal grease Thermal paste (also called thermal compound, thermal grease, thermal interface material (TIM), thermal gel, heat paste, heat sink compound, heat sink paste or CPU grease) is a thermally conductive (but usually electrically insulating) chemi ...

s and gap pads. *Simcenter Flomaster is a 1D or system-level CFD solution for analyzing fluid mechanics in complex pipe flow systems (from the acquisition of Flowmaster Ltd in 2012). *CADRA Design Drafting is a 2-1/2D mechanical drafting and documentation package specifically designed for drafting professionals. It provides the tools needed to develop complex drawings quickly and easily (from the acquisition of the CADRA product in 2013).

References

{{Authority control Companies based in Wilsonville, Oregon 1981 establishments in Oregon 2017 mergers and acquisitions Electronic design automation companies Electronics companies established in 1981 Electronics companies of the United States Siemens American subsidiaries of foreign companies