I searched the EE Times site on Mentor and Desai. "I bet there will be no organic growth from the Mentor/Innoveda acquisition," Desai said. "Mentor has become a bottom feeder that sucks up smaller, dying companies, not small companies on the rise that haven't reached their full potential." In other quotes Desai said that Mentor should try to get Cadence to buy them. Or that the much smaller Magma should somehow acquire Mentor to put Calibre in the hands of the Magma sales force. I laughed. Desai doesn't sugarcoat what he thinks. I respect that. But I have to disagree with him on the tone of his view of Mentor as a company overall.

As an EDA user, I've seen Mentor be very powerful in the areas it focuses on. The problem is that as a company, Mentor's a doughnut. In the front end, Model Tech owns the Verilog and VHDL PC simulation market. Exemplar does OK in FPGA synthesis. The Fastscan tools are best-in-class. Its Inventra IP library sells designs by the boatload. In the back end, its Calibre and xCalibre tools are also best-in-class. The problem is that doughnut hole smack in the middle where synthesis and place and route are. It simply screams for Mentor to acquire Magma or Monterey to fill it!

And I'm not the only one who sees this.

"Mentor perplexes me," Intrinisix' John Weiland wrote to my DAC'02 survey. "They have competitive (and sometimes best-in-class) tools in DRC/LVS/extraction, scan insertion and ATPG, simulation and formal verification, and a very strong IP business. But Mentor has a huge hole right in the middle-synthesis, place and route. I wonder what would happen if they got together with Magma."

They say Mentor was the second bidder before Synopsys acquired Avanti. I think it's only a matter of time and price before Mentor buys Magma or Monterey. When it happens, it'll be interesting to see what Desai says about Mentor. And when Mentor's no longer a doughnut company, maybe then we'll see panels with Wally and Erach together.

John Cooley runs the E-mail Synopsys Users Group (ESNUG), is a Contract Asic Designer and loves hearing from engineers at jcooley@theworld.com or (508) 429-4357.