Profile: Mentor Graphics Corp (MENT.O)

Mentor Graphics Corporation, incorporated on April 2, 1981, is a supplier of electronic design automation (EDA) tools - computer software and emulation hardware systems used to automate the design, analysis, and testing of electro-mechanical systems, electronic hardware, and embedded systems software in electronic systems and components. The Company markets its products and services worldwide, primarily to companies in the military and aerospace, communications, computer, consumer electronics, semiconductor, networking, multimedia, and transportation industries. The Company sells and licenses its products through its direct sales force and a channel of distributors and sales representatives. It has sales, support, software development, and professional service offices worldwide. The electronic components and systems that the Company’s customers create with its products include printed circuit boards (PCBs), integrated circuits (ICs), field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), embedded software solutions, wire harness systems, and computers. In January 2012, the Company acquired the Flowmaster Group.

The Company’s products are used in the design and development of a diverse set of electronic products, including automotive electronics, computers and workstations, digital cameras, cellular telephones, medical devices, smart phones, industrial electronics, and manufacturing systems. As silicon manufacturing process geometries shrink, its customers are creating electronic systems on a single IC. These are called system-on-chip (SoC) devices. The Company segregates revenues into five categories: These categories include Scalable Verification, IC Design to Silicon, Integrated System Design, New and Emerging Products, and Services and Other. The Company’s manufacturing operations primarily consists of reproduction of its software and documentation. Mentor Graphics (Ireland) Limited, a wholly owned subsidiary of the Company, manufactures, or contracts with third-parties to manufacture its products and distributes these products worldwide through the Company’s established sales channels.

Scalable Verification

The Mentor Graphics Scalable Verification tools allow engineers to verify that their complex IC designs function as intended. The Company offers the digital simulation products, which include The ModelSim and The Questa. The ModelSim software tool is a hardware description language (HDL) mixed-language digital simulator that helps hardware designers verify that their IC design functions correctly before the design is completed, and is used for application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs), SoCs, FPGAs, and other IC design verification, as well as verification of entire systems. The Questa scalable verification platform includes support for HDLs, including System Verilog, simulation, and verification methodologies including assertions and formal methods.

The Questa platform is used for more extended verification of systems and ICs including ASICs, SoCs, and FPGAs. Along with digital simulation products, the Company offers analog/mixed-signal simulators. Its analog/mixed signal simulation products include the Eldo, ADVance MS, and ADiT tools. The Company provides hardware emulation systems, such as the Company’s Veloce product, which allow users to create functional and logical equivalent models of actual electronic circuits to verify the function and timing of those circuits. Its Veloce product allows customers to verify designs containing up to one billion logic gates.

IC Design to Silicon

The Company offers the Calibre tool family. The Calibre physical verification tool suite, Calibre DRC and Calibre LVS, helps ensure that a particular IC layout corresponds to the original schematic or circuit diagram of the design and conforms to stringent manufacturing rules at wafer fabs where ICs are manufactured. The Calibre xRC and xACT products, transistor-level extraction and device modeling tools, compute the values of circuit parameters including interconnect resistances, capacitances, and inductances. The Calibre lithography tools allow engineers to model, enhance, and verify layouts using lithography resolution enhancement techniques, including optical and process correction, phase-shift mask, scattering bars, and off-axis illumination. In the Design For Manufacturing (DFM) area, the Calibre LFD product can help customers produce yields at nanometer process geometries. The Calibre CMPAnalyzer tool allows customers to model the expected planarity (that is., thickness variation) of ICs and identify where modifications to the layout will improve a chip’s flatness. The Calibre PERC is a tool for checking the electrical design of an IC.

The Company also offers the Olympus-SoC place and route product targeted at customers designing ICs using geometries of 65 nanometers and below. The Olympus-SoC product addresses IC design challenges. The Olympus-SoC place and route solution addresses these issues with technology, such as Design Rule Checkers-, DFM-, power-aware routing, lithography-friendly layout, and multi-corner multi-mode timing analysis. The Company’s Tessent suite of integrated silicon test products are used to test a design’s logic and memories after manufacturing to ensure that a manufactured IC is functioning correctly. Its suite of tools includes scan insertion, automatic test pattern generation, logic and memory built-in self-test, and its Tessent TestKompress product for embedded deterministic test (EDT).

Integrated System Design

Mentor Graphics Corporation’s PCB-FPGA Systems Design software products support the PCB design process from schematic entry, where the electronic circuit is defined by engineers, through physical layout of the PCB, to providing digital output data for manufacturing, assembly, and test. Most types of designs, including analog, radio frequency, and digital and mixed signal, are supported by its PCB design tools. The Company has integrated software tool flows for process management, component library creation, simulation, and verification of the PCB design: Expedition Series, PADS, I/O Designer, XtremePCB and XtremeAR. The Expedition Series product line is its principal PCB design family of products used by larger enterprise customers. It also offers the PADS product line, which provides a Windows-based PCB design and layout solution. The Company’s I/O Designer product integrates FPGA input/output planning with its PCB design tools. The XtremePCB tool offers a method for simultaneous design where multiple designers can edit the same design at the same time and view each other’s edits in real-time. Its XtremeAR product is a PCB routing product.

The Company’s AutoActive place and route technology is available on both UNIX and Windows platforms. The AutoActive technology is incorporated into the Expedition product line. Its Hyperlynx design technology tools address signal integrity and timing challenges of PCB designs. The Company’s Mechanical Analysis division offers a line of products that provide simulation of mechanical engineering design processes involving heat transfer and fluid flow. The FloEFD product is embedded in a range of commercial mechanical computer aided design software products and enables design engineers to conduct computational fluid dynamics analysis throughout the product’s lifecycle. Its Valor division offers a line of products for printed circuit board, design for manufacturing, and manufacturing execution systems. Valor’s solutions target three key segments in the PCB manufacturing market: design of the physical layout of the PCB, fabrication of the bare PCB, and assembly of PCB components.

New and Emerging Products

The Company’s Integrated Electrical Systems division provides software for design, analysis, manufacture, and data management of wire harness systems used by automotive, aerospace, and other industries. Mentor Graphics Corporation also offer a variety of software tools targeting the automotive market that focus on the functional design of the electronic components of cars. It offers a suite of products for companies developing embedded software for products, such as smart phones, automotive and aviation infotainment systems, and consumer electronics. Its offerings in this area are real-time operating systems, Linux and Android (Google) products and services, middleware, and associated development and debugging tools.

The Company competes with Cadence Design Systems, Inc. and Synopsys, Inc.