Mentor prepares IC packaging initiative Here's a little scoop from a Fabless Semiconductor Association (FSA) conference this week: Mentor Graphics Corp. is preparing to enter the IC packaging market with a tool set that will support IC/package/pc-board co-design.	Richard Goering EDA Software Editor
The FSA held its SiP Conference, the first such event in Silicon Valley, Jan. 23-24. At the conference, users complained loudly about the lack of SiP tools. A recurring theme was the need for a "co-design" approach that provides an integrated design flow across IC, package, and board design. In an EDA vendor panel, Per Viklund, director of packaging and RF for Mentor's systems design division, revealed that Mentor is preparing a new IC packaging tool set that will facilitate "cross-organization collaboration." He noted that Mentor last entered the IC packaging market over a decade ago, and is not actively pursuing that market today. "My charter at Mentor is to change that completely," Viklund said. Viklund said the packaging tool will let users manage I/O planning, interconnect, functional verification, signal and power integrity, thermal and mechanical analysis, and manufacturing and test, all in a collaborative environment with IC design. He said that Mentor is currently "working with a select number of early adopters to develop this technology." Viklund later told me that the technology has its origins in Dansk Data Elektronik (DDE), a pc-board and multi-chip module tool company that Mentor purchased in 2003. I remember that. It was part of an ongoing consolidation among pc-board CAD vendors. The Mentor DDE purchase was a little hard to figure out at the time, since Mentor already had acquired pc-board technology from several sources. Now it appears that the reason for the DDE acquisition was a renewed thrust into the IC packaging area. As one FSA panelist said, packaging has been the "poor stepchild" of the electronics industry, with little tool support and no connection to IC or pc-board design. If Mentor can help change that situation, so much the better. Posted by Richard Goering on Jan 26, 2007 07:01 PM in EDA Software

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