You’ve all heard the rumors: Mentor Graphics is for sale. If it’s true, who could be buying? Let’s indulge in a gedankenexperiment to find out.

First there’s Cadence. Obviously. Mentor and Cadence both sell back-end tools and combining the two would create a powerful market-leading organization. Clearly Cadence is bigger and richer so they’d be doing the buying, but Mentor would be calling the shots. Why? Because last time these two bad hombres went through this mating dance, Mentor put the kibosh on things by orchestrating an outcry to the SEC about anti-trust. Mentor didn’t want to be bought in 2008, but now things might be different, their preferred outcome not so cut-and-dried. So Cadence is Good idea Number One.

I have frequently written about various aspects of USB and presented many seminar and conference sessions on the topic. I find it interesting that, considering that USB is such a straightforward technology for most users to utilize, its deployment in devices can be quite challenging.

A particular area of confusion is USB Class Drivers. The word “class” is very overloaded in the software world – it has numerous meanings. And the term “driver” is far from precise. So, it is unsurprising that the subject provokes discussion …