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Comment by nom | Hacker News Reader

Only few people have contact with their product, but if you have to work with hardware description languages like VHDL or Verilog or want to design a chip, you will be very familiar with them. I think Mentor dominates the market together with Cadence and Synopsis. The tools used for chip design are so incredibly complex, it's impossible to build a competing product without decades of experience and development.

What I find interesting is that tools like ModelSim don't look like modern software, the UI was never changed because it's not important. Examples:

Mentor Modelsim: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9mpRF6bAY1g

Cadence Virtuoso: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DPCu822wXPQ

Synopsys Design Compiler: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JvZmwWJ2FGI

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It's funny- I grew up in Portland with my dad working for Sequent (they built some pretty cool servers back in the day). We had stacks of various Cadence CDs sitting around in the home office growing up.

Mentor Graphics has a huge presence here and pretty much everyone over the age of 35 in the Portland tech scene has worked for them or Intel at some point. One of my business partners worked there for at least a decade when I was in diapers.

After IBM bought Sequent (a few years between events) my dad worked at Synopsys (also in the Portland area) for quite a while.

To me, it's just always been, yeah Cadence, Mentor, Synopsys- no big deal. Then when someone freaks out because I have access to some of the tools or their eyes roll back and their look goes blank I remember that they are wildly specific companies that mean nothing to like 95% of the people I have ever met.

EDIT: To bring it back full circle in a way no on else cares about: Nike wound up buying/taking control of the old Sequent campus after IBM bought them. Shortly after I had my first child I found myself working on a tech project as a partner with Nike in my dad's old building, on his old floor, in generally the same area and I had a kind of weird mental moment.

The PCB design team at my job almost all use Mentor Xpedition. From my experience with those guys, they would not appreciate modern software UIs in their CAD tool at all. Half of them refuse to upgrade from Windows XP because they don't see a point. If an update to Xpedition suddenly had a super clean/minimal UI someone might actually have a stroke haha.

It's important to note that most if not all of these tools are written for Linux first. You would usually have a local server running the tools which you'd then SSH into and use X11 forwarding to get the GUI. Interestingly, most of these tools can be fully automated and operated from the command line using Tcl (Mentor), or even a custom scripting language like Cadence's OCEAN.

I personally found Cadence Virtuoso to have above average UX, but I do agree that the GUI looks slightly dated.

They didn't start by writing their tools for Linux, as all of these companies were founded in the eighties and started writing their software before Linux even existed...

And Mentor Graphics initially ran on Apollo machines, which were running a proprietary though somewhat Unix-like OS (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Domain/OS).

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mentor_Graphics https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cadence_Design_Systems https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synopsys

I'm not familiar with the history of their tools to be frank. I was talking about their current offerings, which are as I said mostly designed to run on Linux, with Windows support added in as an afterthought - if you're lucky.

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