Changing business models as Atrenta buys NextOp

6/20/2012 11:51 AM EDT

As many of you know, I have been conducting interviews for my upcoming series on the emerging Middle Class of EDA. This is about the changing landscape for startups and mature smaller and mid-sized companies in the industry now that it is not a given that they will get bought by one of the big three. We saw an interesting migration of technology a year back when Mentor Graphics transferred its CatapultC technology to Calypto – a bet on the fact that a smaller EDA company would do better with the technology than perhaps they could. Today we see another example of a business development with one of the mid-sized private companies becoming the acquirer – specifically Atrenta is acquiring NextOp.

This is an interesting acquisition for Atrenta who have concentrated on static analysis to help find problems in a design and to provide early warnings about things that may create problems later in the flow. NextOp has concentrated on functional verification but in an interesting way that brings dynamic and static techniques together.

NextOp has an assertion synthesis tool called BugScope. This uses design and testbench information to automatically generate assertions and functional coverage properties. Assertions represent a machine-readable version of design intent and are used to improve verification completeness. Functional coverage properties identify functional coverage deficiencies providing guidance for verification teams. When used together, design teams can reduce functional verification time and improve overall functional coverage.