Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics in $4.5B deal

[nickpsecurity]

This isn't good news. One of my ideas for open, secure hardware involved a partial or whole acquisition of Mentor by a company that was pro-FOSS. Then, the product lines would be tweaked for easy verification. Plus deals for hardware startups that got them the tools cheap to free early on with guaranteed revenue for Mentor if successful.

Now, one of the Big 3 of EDA is in the hands of a large corporation far from our interests. This kind of thing happens a lot. It's to be expected. Oh well.

[abawany]

Used to work at Siemens. Their open-source policies were onerous from a consumption point-of-view. Every revision of every approved open-source product had to be reviewed by their open-source legal hawks to ensure that nothing had changed. I don't remember their mandatory training on open source but I especially don't recall any encouragement to publish open source projects and to contribute to them. Great company but it certainly treated open-source with a sentiment that I can only describe as fear.

[e19293001]

I agree. It's disappointing to see a news like this. Mentor Graphics did a really great job on their verification tutorials that had done a great benefit to my career. I'm not sure Synopsys is winning the competition though. I just hope some great startup would emerge that's willing to support FOSS or rather some group of people willing to put their effort in creating the next generation and yet competitive and free EDA tools that I'll be interested to join.

[rfrank]

Agree with your sentiment, but wouldn't Cadence or Altium be better candidates than Mentor for that goal?

[lmedinas]

Also related since both, Mentor and Harman, have a strong automotive business: https://news.samsung.com/global/samsung-electronics-to-acqui...

[Cyph0n]

One of their more interesting products is a ANC (active noise control) chip for use in commercial vehicles [1]. I have yet to see a working demo of it in the wild, but they claim that it works. Their solution requires sensors installed on the engine block on top of the microphones installed in the cabin.

[1]: https://www.mentor.com/embedded-software/xse-automotive/acti...

[spatulon]

Strange, because Siemens sold their automotive business (VDO) to Continental in 2007.

[Matthias247]

And Harman even uses some of Mentors products ;)

[sguav]

Intel->Altera,

Siemens->Mentor,

It'll be interesting to check Siemens' Modelsim - Intel edition and to see if they will eventually move to Qt for the GUI!

[valarauca1]

Alt Headline: Siemens to buy Mentor Graphics for 0.15 LinkedIns, or .23 WhatsApps

[frozenport]

Mentor graphics has revenue of 1 billion, instagram has revenue of 3 billion and maybe more growth potential.

[raverbashing]

Hopefully it will not get (too much) infected by corporate red tape and inefficiencies of the parent company

[fazkan]

Well I work here, and its safe to assume that it was already infected...lets hope that the parent company does the opposite...

[barrkel]

$4.5B, not $45B.

[jrwan]

The title is a unintentional clickbait...lol

[pferdone]

chump change