Archive for October, 2016
Wednesday, October 26th, 2016
Last week on Friday and Saturday, the IEEE Council on EDA hosted a 2-day workshop to discuss the future of design automation. Mentor Graphics provided the venue – a large conference room in their Fremont/Silicon Valley campus – and workshop leaders, UCSD Prof. Andrew Kahng, UCSD Prof. Farinaz Koushanfa, and Intel alum/CEDA President Shishpal Rawat provided the welcome.
Over the two days, a group of 50+ attendees – representing a wide cross-section of academics and industry experts – launched into conversations that were lively, energized, at times contentious, and completely engrossing. Put simply, there was no better place on the face of the globe on October 21st and 22nd where tech junkies were more intellectually challenged and entertained than at the Design Automation Futures Workshop in Fremont.
What made the workshop so compelling? For this, their inaugural DAFW, CEDA chose to address neuromorphic computing – the ultimate hotness related to machine learning, with a lot of promise for future applications. It doesn’t get any more design futures, or futuristic, than this.
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Tags: Andrew Kahng, DAFW 2016, Design Automation Futures Workshop, Farinaz Koushanfa, Google, IEEE CEDA, Intel, Machine Learning, Magma, Mentor Graphics, O-In Design Automation, Patrick Groeneveld, Richard Ho, Shishpal Rawat, Synopsys, The Rolling Stones, UC San Diego
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Thursday, October 20th, 2016
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.
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Thursday, October 13th, 2016
Congrats to the ESD Alliance for continuing to attend to myriad legal issues that surround the business of technology. On Tuesday, November 1st, the organization is hosting an evening panel on the Cadence campus entitled “Legal Steps to Maximize Your Exit Value.”
Vital topics slated for discussion include setting the proper price for intangible assets – in-house IP, strategic partnerships, and good will – and more prosaic issues such as the appropriate legal structures and pre-deal tax planning needed to help facilitate the acquisition. Most importantly, panel organizers are also promising you’ll learn “how to avoid giving it all back to your buyer later”.
Which is where our EDA M&A Hall of Fame comes in. There’s just no way this ESD Alliance panel can carry any weight with a battle-hardened EDA audience without the likes of Sanjay Srivastava, Rajeev Madhavan, Chris Rowen, and Kathryn Kranen sitting up at the front of the room.
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Tags: Cadence, Chris Rowen, Denali, Dennis Fernandez, ESD Alliance, Fudderman Dupree, Jasper Design Automation, Kathryn Kranen, Magma, Mark White, Neil Shroff, Orion Capital, Rajeev Madhavan, Sanjay Srivastava, Silvaco, Synopsys, Tensilica, Tom Maier, Warren Savage, White Summers Caffee & James
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Thursday, October 6th, 2016
In July 2008 and with much fanfare, Cadence declared its intention to purchase Mentor Graphics. The Cadence executive team was so confident the purchase would go through, then-CFO Bill Porter declared during an analysts’ call at the time: This acquisition is going to happen, Mentor needs us. Accept it and move on.
Well, people did move on. By September 2008, Cadence CEO Mike Fister, CFO Porter and the entire executive team had indeed moved on. CDNS Board member Lip-Bu Tan was named acting CEO and here, 8 years later, he continues to serve in that role.
* Results: Mentor stock in May 2008 was at about $11.50/share, by June 2008 it had moved to $16, by October 2008 it was down to less than $8, and by March 2009 was barely above $4. Ouch.
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Tags: Bill Porter, Cadence, Carl Icahn, Elliott Associates, Lip-bu Tan, Mentor Graphics, Mike Fister, Wally Rhines
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