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Comment by rfrank | Hacker News Reader

Agree with your sentiment, but wouldn't Cadence or Altium be better candidates than Mentor for that goal?

There's pretty good HLS tools and other things to work at a high level. The real difficulty is on verification, RTL synthesis, material checks, fast simulation, etc. Altium lacks a bit of these whereas Cadence is huge. That Mentor was so tiny in market cap despite having something good for every part of the stack, even software side, made them the best buy.

I have occasionally recommended Altium to people designing new hardware just because they have a nice cost/benefit ratio. So, did Tanner on PCB's and analog. Mentor bought Tanner. Now we're back to Mentor. :)

That makes sense. Rightly or wrongly, I perceive Mentor as having lots of users who cater to companies in industries like telecom, medical, or A&D who aren't very pro-FOSS (on a corporate level, at least).

It would be cool to see them open up access to their tools somehow though; Library Manager, Valor DFM, maybe even something like HyperLynx. Not sure how open people would be to some sort of royalty agreement in exchange for access to CAD tools.

That last part will need some market research. eASIC already seems to do it for silicon. Quite a few vendors in embedded do for their side. There's at least potential HW upstart would want a pile of tooling at zero cost in exchange for a percentage of operating profits they get from it.

Definitely true, seems like it would depend pretty heavily on what's being made & at what scale (as if that isn't true for all mfg haha). Something that takes a few PCBs and needs bare boards, assembly, system integration, packaging, shipping, etc etc, could make a percentage of profits challenging. Makes sense to me for embedded because they're after platform adoption as well.

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