Electronics Weekly Electronics Design & Components Tech News
Announcing the name change, Joe Sawicki, executive vice president of IC-EDA, Siemens EDA (pictured), said that the name brings EDA software, simulation, mechanical design, manufacturing, cloud, IoT and low code technology under a single banner for industrial software. “Mentor has always pioneered digitalisation of electronic design and Siemens brings world-class digitalisation to big systems like planes, automobiles, factories, and cities. Connecting electronic design to big systems is the vision for our customers,” he wrote in a blog about the name change.
He takes a positive view of the rate of digitisation and the impact it will have on the EDA market. “Whether it’s startups or large system houses creating internal design teams, we are seeing new players in the IC design market every day and it’s clear that will drive tremendous growth in the EDA business,” he said.
“One way to see this is to take a look at the forecasting for data traffic which shows a 400X increase over the next few years. Whether the end market is a product in the gaming, video, IoT, automotive, or medical sectors, those markets are projected to be larger than the entire data traffic today!” And the systems used to process and transmit this data rely on semiconductors.
Another driver is the use of a digital twin to design, verify and manufacture electronic systems which run software and interact with the physical world, to ensure operation and performance is as expected.
Siemens EDA simulates both the digital twin of the manufacturing process and of the device; a combination which provides feedback during operation to improve the design or perform a software upgrade.
The year after the Mentor acquisition, Siemens bought Finnish 5G test equipment company, Sarokal. The move is explained by Sawicki: “What that [verification] community did not figure out at the time was . . . the key to these 5G telecommunication products is design and verification of custom SoCs.
“5G SoCs demand a new verification approach that meets the challenges of the exponential rise in required tests driven by the flexibility and configurability possible in the 5G radio access network,” he continued.
“Providing digital twins is incredibly complex, but we view complexity as an opportunity to leverage our vast portfolio of products to meet the challenges of electronic systems today and tomorrow,” he concluded.
Reminds me of the 1970s when British Leyland nearly removed the “Jaguar” badges from Jags to be replaced with “Leyland” badges…. only, not even THEY were so stupid. Back in the ’90s, VW bought Bentley and BMW bought Rolls Royce Motors but they recognised the value in the brands.
Most people still refer to “Tessent” as LogicVision. It seems that folks in our industry still maintain some respect for these original products and brands…. except for a handful of folks in Germany, blinded by their own Siemens …..brand.
Neil, what is more important to you: the quality of the product or the name of the product? We cannot compare a car brand (millions of customers/year, many of them buying cars just because an expensive car provides a certain status in the society) with an EDA tool brand (hundreds, maybe thousands of customers, all of them judging a tool by its capabilities/efficiency/costs per license).
Intel did the same rebranding thing with Altera and AMD will probably do the same with Xilinx in the near future. As far as I remember, none of these companies are German based… 🙂
Yes indeed Malcolm it’s a very German thing to do and rather stupid – if you think highly enough of a business to buy it, you must think its identity means something to its customers.
and with it 40 years of history and corporate brand recognition down the drain … all in the name of corporate ego??
Yes, Mentor was the oldest name in the industry. I used Mentor tools when I started my first job in 1985. On the other hand, after Siemens acquired UltraSoC in July this year people I know there have put “Tessent Silicon Lifecycle Solutions, Mentor, A Siemens Business” as their company affiliation. Maybe that will now become the far more snappy “Tessent Silicon Lifecycle Solutions, Siemens EDA”.