Mentor Graphics® is a technology leader in electronic design automation (EDA), providing software and hardware design solutions that enable companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. The company offers innovative products and solutions that help engineers overcome the design challenges they face in the increasingly complex worlds of board and chip design.
Mentor Graphics has the broadest industry portfolio of best-in-class products and is the only EDA company with an embedded software solution.
- Publicly held (NASDAQ: MENT)
- Founded 1981, headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon
- Revenue in last reported 12 months: about $915 million
- Over 70 offices worldwide
- World Wide Web address - www.mentor.com
Traditional EDA tools for physical design and verification are starting to reach limits due to greater manufacturing process variability and the growing size and complexity of designs taking advantage of 65/45 nanometer scaling. In advanced process technologies, the handoff between integrated circuit (IC) layout and manufacturing has changed. In previous technologies, the handoff was a simple check when the design went to manufacturing. Now it is a multi-step process where the layout database is modified so the design can be manufactured. This presents a host of challenges related to manufacturing process effects, photolithography, data volumes, and achieving a cost-effective yield of finished chips from each wafer.
To meet these challenges with confidence, design teams turn to Mentor’s Olympus-SoC™ place and route system with Multi-Corner-Multi-Mode timing analysis and DFM-aware layout optimization for rapid closure of physical designs. The Olympus-SoC system works with the industry-leading integrated Calibre® design-to-silicon platform, which includes physical verification, full-chip, transistor-level parasitic extraction, model-based design for manufacturability (DFM) solutions, mask data preparation (MDP) and resolution enhancement technologies (RET), such as optical proximity correction and other computational lithography techniques. The Calibre product family efficiently and accurately manages every facet of the design-to-silicon transition.
Moving to ever-smaller geometries and new process materials also causes a fundamental shift in the physical defect spectrum in silicon manufacturing. The Mentor Graphics Tessent® TestKompress® automatic test program generation (ATPG) tool provides the broadest range of fault models and the highest test pattern compression available to help companies efficiently screen complex devices to identify the new types of failures, while simultaneously reducing the cost of test. The Tessent YieldAssist® product uses volume test data to pin point the cause of failures and to feed information back to design and verification tools to accelerate the yield-learning ramp and eliminate the root cause of defects.
Mentor Graphics provides its customers with critical tools for solving the increasingly complicated problems of verifying that today’s complex chip designs actually function as intended. Functional errors at the system level are the leading cause of design revisions affecting time to market and profitability. Design teams must improve existing methodologies with tools that scale across design complexity and multiple levels of abstraction. The Mentor Graphics Scalable Verification™ platform, featuring the Questa™ advanced verification environment, is the most comprehensive EDA solution for functional verification, merging standards support, tools and a “design for verification” methodology to minimize verification cycles and design revisions. This solution provides the industry’s best language support and the most complete path for verification, from hardware description language (HDL) simulation to in-circuit emulation, including support for testbenches, assertions and functional prototypes. Mentor offers standards-based support for the most advanced verification requirements with integrated technologies now including the 0-In® assertion-based verification tools and methodologies to enable comprehensive verification throughout the entire design.
The Scalable Verification platform is comprised of “best-in-class” technologies. Mentor supports the Open Verification Methodology (OVM), the industry's first true, Open Source system-level to RLT verification methodology implemented in SystemC and SystemVerilog languages. Other technologies include the popular ModelSim® simulator, Seamless® Hardware/Software Co-Verification, and Questa ADMS for analog/mixed-signal verification. Mentor’s verification offering is completed by the industry’s fastest functional verification platform for systems on chip and embedded systems. The Veloce™ product family of hardware-assisted solutions further strengthens the company’s leadership in high-performance transaction-based acceleration.
As ICs, ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) become more complex and printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication technology advances to include embedded components and high-density interconnect layers, the design of PCBs is reaching new levels of complexity. These are frequently a source of design bottlenecks.
Mentor Graphics is the market and technology leader in PCB systems design, providing many of the world’s largest system design companies with a range of scalable design solutions to reduce the time, cost and risk of electronic system design: Expedition™ Enterprise and Board Station XE for the design of the world’s most advanced electronic products by the global enterprise; and the PADS® flow, the leading Windows-based solution for complex PCB design.Mentor Graphics also offers solutions for specific design challenges such as radio frequency (RF) design management, high-speed routing and verification advanced packaging, concurrent team design, FPGA-on-board integration and design data management. The company also provides thermal analysis simulation software for the electronics industry. Mentor’s family of market-leading electronics cooling simulation tools—FloTHERM®, FloTHERM® PCB— helps users predict airflow, temperature and heat transfer in components, boards and complete systems.With the acquisition of Valor Computerized Systems, Mentor has extended PCB development solutions into manufacturing and is the only EDA supplier to provide a complete PCB concept-through-manufacturing solution.
The world’s leading design-for-manufacturing analysis products assure that a PCB design is delivered to manufacturing correct and requires no design re-spins. The Manufacturing Systems Solutions suite enables optimization of the manufacturing line and on-line quality monitoring to insure the process is producing target volume products at minimal cost.Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) has been used by specialists for years to analyze fluid (liquids and gases) flows and heat transfer of complex mechanical systems. But with today’s pressures to bring products to market faster and at reduced costs, it is required that MCAD designers and engineers, in addition to specialists, be able to perform these analyses directly in their mechanical design system. Mentor provides MCAD-embedded CFD solutions to designers requiring fast and accurate fluid flow analysis of mechanical products (FloEFD™) and building heating, air conditioning and ventilation (FloVENT®).
Most electronics products today are a synthesis of hardware design and embedded software, and the embedded software is the main differentiator for product functionality and performance. As a result, embedded software has increased dramatically in electronic systems design.
Mentor Graphics is the only EDA company to offer vendor-independent embedded and open source software, tools and services to help device manufacturers and embedded software engineers through every stage of product development.
The Mentor Embedded™ products and services include the Nucleus® real time operating system (RTOS), Inflexion Platform™ UI graphics user interface, the ReadyStart™ Platform, Android and Linux development systems and the EDGE™ Developer Suite.Consulting, Services and SupportMentor Graphics global customer support organization offers leading customer support solutions online, by phone, and in-person to ensure that customers can find answers to their questions at any hour of the day or night from anywhere in the world.
The company's "customer first" approach has resulted in Mentor Graphics being the only EDA company to achieve Support Center Practices (SCP) certification and be an unprecedented five-time winner of the Software Technical Assistance Recognition (STAR) Award from the Service and Support Professionals Association. Mentor is also the first company to earn certification for its web support services through the internationally-recognized Service Capability & Performance (SCP) Standards.
Mentor Consulting is an expert in electronic design infrastructures and methodology services and is the only service partner in the industry that invests in the transfer of knowledge to its customers. Their solutions are used worldwide by forward-looking electronics companies to optimize design productivity and advance adoption of the latest industry design best practices. Education Services is focused on developing and delivering quality training to help customers assimilate new tools and technologies into their design environments, increasing productivity and ensuring success in the marketplace.
Mentor Graphics, Mentor, Capital, Seamless, ModelSim, Calibre, Tessent, TestKompress, YieldAssist, Board Station, PADS, Catapult, Nucleus, Veloce, 0-in, FloTHERM and FloVENT are registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. Mentor Embedded, Questa, Vista, Visual Elite, Volcano, Expedition, Olympus-SoC, FloEFD, EDGE, Inflexion Platform and ReadyStart are trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation.
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