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Mentor Graphics: LBO Recommended

Posted on Friday, Dec 28th

Our third company in the EDA review is Mentor Graphics (MENT). As I said in the Cadence piece, if any company in the EDA industry is perfect for an LBO, it is Mentor Graphics. It has at least two excellent franchises – DFM and PCB design – and other players in the industry would be

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Synopsys Looks Healthy, But

Posted on Thursday, Dec 27th

In our EDA review, Synopsys (Nasdaq: SNPS) is the second major player, always going neck-to-neck with Cadence. Synopsys announced Q4 earnings on December 6, 2007. Unlike the losses posted by competitor Mentor, Synopsys executives were quite pleased with their results and momentum throughout the year enabling Synopsys to meet or exceed all of their original

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Cadence: Buyout Rumors Persist

Posted on Wednesday, Dec 26th

I have regularly commented on the EDA industry and discussed specific companies in the past, including Cadence, Mentor, Magma, and Synopsys. Today I come back to look at Cadence again, and examine what has changed since. During the summer Cadence (CDNS) was rumored to be in buyout discussions with Blackstone and KKR, which I said

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Cadence LBO?

Posted on Monday, Jun 11th

Does naivete rule, when investors send Cadence shares up to a 52-week high on the rumors of a buy-out? The truth is, a Private Equity player buying Cadence doesn’t make a hell of a lot of sense, since the company has a very slow growth rate due to the industry’s normal behavior patterns. It has

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iPhone and the Future of ARM

Posted on Monday, May 7th

Chances are, you have not heard of British chipmaker ARM, and don’t understand their business model. ARM develops semiconductor IP cores that most other chip vendors license and include in their products, to speed up their design cycles. ARM, in turn, collects royalties from these licensing deals. It is by far the largest IP core

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Is Cadence Growing at the Expense of Magma?

Posted on Sunday, Feb 18th

I have written extensively about the structural dysfuctions of the EDA industry in Future of EDA, Future of EDA: Addendum. The only two growth areas in the EDA market are Design for Manufacturability / Yield (DFM / DFY) and the pre-synthesis part of the flow that includes system-level design, hardware-software codesign, and prototyping. It turns

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Future of EDA: Addendum

Posted on Friday, Oct 27th

Recently, Gartner fired their EDA research team, part and parcel, with veteran analysts Gary Smith and Daya Nadamuni. Here’s John Cooley’s report on the departure with comments from many industry stalwarts. This takes out the last remaining independent analyst that covered EDA as an industry. There is a problem in EDA. Small $4 Billion market

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DAC 2006

Posted on Tuesday, Jul 25th

Design Automation Conference is going on in San Francisco right now. Read a report from EETimes on Joe Costello’s keynote about the Future of EDA. Note, Joe is talking about web 2.0 concepts and mashups in the context of EDA. My piece on the Future of EDA is here. We all agree on one thing:

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