Tout ensemble! Mentor, MINC buy French firms

Electronic News, Dec 18, 1995 by Judy Erkanat

Mountain View, Calif.--Last week, acquisitions of French electronic design automation companies were de rigueur, with both Mentor Graphics and MINC Inc. acquiring Gallic businesses.

Mentor Graphics added Meta Systems to its ever-growing list of assets and MINC bought Innovative Synthesis Technologies (IST) in what market analysts dubbed a smart move. Mentor and Meta also made an immediate announcement of their first joint product introduction: the SimExpress hardware emulator.

Mentor signed a definitive agreement to acquire the hardware emulation technolcontinued from page 1 ogy company which operates out of Saclay, France. The deal had been expected for months (EN, Antenna, Aug. 7, Sept. 18).

The value of the transaction was not disclosed, but the verbally approved deal is expected to close in January, subject to formal approval by French government authorities.

"This deal has been in the works for the last year, although we just started getting serious about it last spring," said Jim Kenny, manager of product marketing for the hardware/software codes business unit of Mentor Graphics. "Two other companies had wanted to acquire Meta and we finally won out. Our interest in hardware emulation is due to the power it delivers to software simulation--an excellent systems design approach."

Industry analyst Gary Smith praised the acquisition. "This is a great deal," said Mr. Smith, senior EDA analyst at Dataquest International. "This deal is similar to Synopsys' buyout of Arkos Design Systems (EN, June 26) and both look similar business-wise. By acquiring Meta, Mentor is now in second place to Quickturn in the emulation market. The hardware/software co-design and combination of emulation and simulation puts Mentor is a real good position. And, unlike Synopsys, the Mentor/Meta product is already in the marketplace, even beating out market leader Quickturn in France."

Quickturn Design Systems' management was unfazed. "This is an acknowledgment by the big guys that deep submicron needs a more powerful tool than simulation, and that's emulation," said Naeem Zafar, VP of marketing for Quickturn.

Meta will be incorporated into Mentor as a new business unit. It will remain in France and report to Chung Tung, Mentor's Hardware/Software Systems division VP/GM.

"The combination of Mentor Graphics and Meta Systems will expedite delivery of solutions that will enable designers to perform high-performance design analysis, overcome disjointed hardware and software design flows, and migrate hardware/software system integration upstream in the design process," said Mr. Tung.

Meta personnel were similarly enthusiastic about the merger. "Mentor Graphics' worldwide sales force and award-winning customer support organization make them an excellent choice to distribute our advanced emulation technology," said Frederic Reblewski, founder of Meta Systems. "Their world leadership and commitment to hardware/software co-design were major factors in our selection to partner."

Meta was established in 1991. Its founders focused their R&D on speeding hardware emulation design turns through the use of full-custom ICs, rather than taking the traditional approach of using commercial field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs).

Unlike the well-predicted Mentor move, MINC's acquisition of IST, an international FPGA and ASIC synthesis company located in Grenoble, France, came as a surprise to many. Financial terms weren't revealed by the privately held MINC.

The terms of this agreement grant MINC full acquisition of IST's assets, including its technology, products and OEM relationships. MINC will maintain both its own development operations in Colorado Springs, Colo., and IST's operations (to be known as MINC-IST) in Grenoble. Professor Gabriele Saucier, one of IST's founders, will become MINC's chief technical officer, while William O. McDermith will remain its VP of engineering. MINC will continue to support IST's current products, OEM relationships and distribution channels, as well as retain all of its employees. IST will be a wholly-owned subsidiary of MINC.

"This acquisition really strengthens MINC's position," said Mr. Smith of Dataquest. "There has been some concern since the NeoCAD buyout that MINC wouldn't survive, but be bought out by someone else. While this might still happen, MINC is acquiring tools to make them more of a player. IST has one of the best FPGA synthesizers around and MINC is definitely worth more today that it was yesterday."

With this acquisition, MINC hopes to become a universal industry vendor able to provide a complete suite of design software for the entire programmable logic spectrum.

"Our motivation for the purchase came from the new devices coming out," said Kevin Bush, MINC's VP of marketing. "We controlled the CPLD area of the market, but then we found ourselves in a make-or-buy situation. New CPLDs will use IST's strengths in Verilog and VHDL, some of the strongest we've seen."

MINC CEO Gene Warrington concurred. "The combination of MINC and IST fills a huge void in the EDA industry," he said. "Now the best of both FPGA and CPLD partitioning, synthesis, optimization, mapping and fitting technologies are brought together to provide a complete solution for programmable logic users."