Veda, Pendulum plan to merge

Electronic News, June 3, 1996 by Gale Bradley

Fareham, U.K., and Waltham, Mass.--Veda Design Automation, in a move designed to give them increased market share in hardware description language (HDL) fault simulation tools, is merging with Pendulum Design.

The two will announce their merger this week at the Design Automation Conference in Las Vegas as finishing touches are put on the contracts making the deal official. The combined company retains the Veda name.

As part of the agreement, the financial backers of both companies will provide additional financing for Veda to add engineers and sales people in Fareham, Waltham, Santa Clara, Calif. and New Jersey.

With its own VerdictFault, a Vital-compliant fault simulator, and Pendulum's 17-month-old vfs Verilog fault simulator, Veda is positioning itself to go after the major share of the HDL-based fault simulation market, Veda CEO Alan Gorlick said.

Pendulum hopes to leverage Veda's sales channels already in place and Veda hopes to have a better arsenal for the world's major Verilog market, the U.S., Mr. Gorlick said.

"Veda really wants much more of a presence in the United States. The majority of the EDA business is in the U.S.," Mr. Gorlick added. "Little Veda, as small as we are, is the biggest EDA company in Europe."

Hence, Veda is moving its corporate headquarters to the former Pendulum home in Waltham. In terms of U.K. and European Veda employees and customers, Mr. Gorlick said there will be no change for them. Part of the new staff additions will be in Fareham, so "there's going to be no trade-off, we're not giving away anything," he said.

Mr. Gorlick indicated that the move does not mean Veda has designs on broadening their offerings beyond the current simulation and code coverage focus. "Key to this strategy is the concept of 'vendor-independence.' Veda's tools work alongside existing VHDL and Verilog simulators, complementing them rather than replacing them.

"As a result of the merger, we can deliver high-performance fault simulators for both VHDL and Verilog users. This completes our product offering and validates our 'vendor-independent' strategy," Mr. Gorlick said.

"That is our model, to be able to say 'continue to do what you're doing.' One analogy we use is we have a better tire, it'll get you better gas mileage; just put them on your car," Mr. Gorlick said. "We don't want to be talking to someone who just purchased a hundred seats of Vantage and have to say 'you made a mistake.' "

Pendulum and Veda have been friendly for about two years. Veda was Pendulum's European distributor for their fault products since they were introduced in January 1995. Right at that time, Mr. Gorlick resigned from Pendulum's board to become Veda's CEO.

Mr. Gorlick's design automation history goes back to 1983, when he was the second salesman Zycad hired, the first from outside the company, he said.

Tedd Corman, Pendulum's VP for engineering, said the men and women of Pendulum will continue development as they have been since "restarting" in 1993, concentrating on logic, fault and cycle-based Verilog simulation technologies. Until last year, Pendulum was known as Evaluations Per Second (EPS).

Mr. Gorlick discussed where the two combined would be going. "I'd say we are first going to complete the fault products in VHDL and Verilog. We will add to those things in both domains.

"It's really amazing. We and Pendulum have the fault (simulation tool) done to about the same point. The two (Pendulum's Verilog version and Veda's VHDL version) were working totally independently and they are developed to the same stage of the game. We're talking about adding fault propagation to both tools, as we've heard back from both sales and customers," Mr. Gorlick said.

Mr. Gorlick said frankly that he would have held off talking about the merger for a while, had it not been DAC time. "DAC's just too good an opportunity."

pg.004 IBM, Cyrix Unveil Latest Ammunition Vs. Intel

Fishkill, N.Y.--IBM and Cyrix will this week jointly introduce the 6x86 P200+, the newest member of the Intel x86 competitor 6x86 microprocessor line. The P200+ offers a 150MHz internal clock speed and will enable a 75MHz system bus--believed to be the industry's highest throughput PC system bus.

Cyrix previewed the P200+ in a recent technology and marketing roadmap, saying it realized Intel would shortly come to market with a higher-speed Pentium (EN, May 20). Intel sources said last week that the Pentium announcement is now expected in mid-June.

In what seems to be an example of a "good cop/bad cop" marketing strategy, the same P200+ is being positioned as a value alternative to Pentium/Pentium Pro by IBM, and as a performance alternative by Cyrix. The MPU will be manufactured at IBM's Burlington, Vt., fab for both IBM and Cyrix. The 6x86 P200+ is based on a Cyrix design and will be manufactured on IBM's 0.44-micron, five-layer metal CMOS technology.

Jill Kaplan, IBM x86 product marketing manager, said in an interview that the chip both companies will offer is identical. "At the end of the line, one of them has a blue label and one has a green label, and that's the only difference." Ms. Kaplan said Cyrix may be able to get the chips into the hands of OEMs a bit sooner than IBM. In terms of marketing, IBM is keying on the cost of the processors--expected to be about 20 percent below Intel's 200MHz Pentium price. IBM has priced the P200+ at $479 in sample quantities of 1,000 units while Cyrix is expected to offer the processor for $499, one dollar less than Intel's current quarterly pricing for its 166MHz Pentium.