Mentor, Synopsys team up

Electronic News, June 9, 1997 by Judy Erkanat

Mountain View, Calif.--Two of the biggest names in electronic design automation (EDA) chose the Design Automation Conference (DAC) this week to enter a strategic partnership. Mentor Graphics CEO Walden C. Rhines and Synopsys CEO Aart de Geus inked a multi-year "Design Reuse Partnership" in response, they said, to customers' increasing demand for design reuse.

The companies are partnering to provide predictable, portable, high-quality intellectual property (IP), IP creation tools and methodologies.

"The original idea started last year at EuroDAC," said Dr. de Geus. "A lot of work has gone into this to make it practical. The design reuse issue made this a natural approach on how to do IP reuse for system on a chip and make 'soft IP' practical."

It was speculated the partnership, unaffiliated with any other EDA industry alliance or group, sought to remedy Synopsys' problems finding enough customers to fund CBA, as well as address Mentor's inability to market its Inventra business unit. Not so, said the CEOs, who maintained CBA at Synopsys and Inventra at Mentor were the fastest-growing parts of their respective businesses.

"This agreement is about working constructively together to reconcile growing silicon capacity with our customers' time-to-market demands," said Dr. Rhines. "This Design Reuse Partnership is the key reuse enabler for today's and tomorrow's productivity requirements. We are pleased to be able to offer our customers soft cores already proven on Synopsys' Cell-based Array (CBA), the industry's leading technology for portable IP implementation."

The combined value of soft IP in CBA through Inventra, now available on 41 libraries from Synopsys, makes IP more predictable, said Dr. de Geus, who added the partnership also made sense since most of Inventra's IP had been designed with Synopsys synthesis.

The Design Reuse Partnership will yield a jointly authored Reuse Methodology Manual by the end of 3Q97. The how-to manual will draw on the experience of Mentor and Synopsys customers, with further details to be available with the finished work.

Some questioned what effect this partnership would have on Mentor's synthesis products.

"Mentor's synthesis will also benefit from this through the how-to manual," Dr. Rhines explained. "Mentor fills a special niche in synthesis, and we have a lot of customers interested in our product for FPGA, and in the issue of interoperability."

The Mentor/Synopsys partnership creates a comprehensive Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA)-compliant IP library and gives impetus toward progressing the charter of the VSIA. Further details on the partnership, expected to develop in an open fashion, are yet to be determined. The companies encourage other participants in what they hope will become a model for design reuse and IP dissemination.

"With the Design Reuse Partnership, we can give customers the flexibility they need to undertake advanced design projects targeting exciting new markets," Dr. de Geus said. "The powerful combination of Mentor Graphics cores and Synopsys synthesis tools for creation of IP offers a depth of design expertise and capability unavailable elsewhere in the industry. We are pleased to endorse Mentor Graphics' Inventra intellectual property business unit, the leading provider of IP cores."

Through the new alliance, fully CBA-synthesized Inventra cores can be pulled off an IP shelf. The cornerstones of the deal are the companies' joint reuse methodology, Synopsys' CBA and its synthesis tools for creating IP; and Mentor's Inventra IP business unit products. More than 100 Mentor Inventra soft cores proven on Synopsys' CBA architecture are now available.

The partnership hopes to leverage its combined strengths to delivery methodology ahead of the technology curve.

Synopsys' CBA family includes libraries, datapath and memory compilers, and a fully integrated silicon implementation system. CBA provides standard cell density, performance and power, while retaining the development time and cost advantages of metal-programmable technologies.

Inventra creates and distributes reusable IP for the system-on-a-chip industry.