Mentor reaffirms NT commitment

Electronic News, March 16, 1998 by Ann Steffora

Seattle--At the recent Microsoft/Intel Leadership Forum on Workstation Computing held here, Mentor Graphics, for the second time in five years, "reinforced its commitment" to moving its tools to the Windows NT platform. This time, the company says by the end of 1998, it will provide a "complete front-to-back design solution" on the NT/Intel platform. This announcement follows Synopsys' public commitment to do the same for its industry-leading tools, including Design Compiler (EN, Feb. 23). Cadence Design Systems announced last year it would be porting its tools to NT.

In 1993, Mentor said it would have its full product line ported to the Windows NT environment in 12-18 months (EN, June 13, 1993). David Chen, then VP of corporate marketing, said Mentor recognized NT would be "a viable alternative to Unix within two to five years." It seems as Mentor is pretty good at forecasting--they are still within their estimated timeframe for having the products ported.

In the meanwhile, Mentor has developed many of its new products from scratch for the PC platform, including Renoir, the graphical entry Board Station, for PCB/MCM design, along with ModelSim, Mentor's ASIC simulator. Additionally, Mentor's Microtec division has a complete embedded applications development environment on both Unix and Intel/NT platforms, which include the VRTX real-time operating system (RTOS), the XRAY Debugger and Microtec C and C++ compilers.

Virtually all major electronic design automation (EDA) vendors have committed to the NT platform for future product development, and have said they will continue to support NT/Intel with products developed for Intel's IA-64 microprocessor, beginning with Merced, expected next year.

In order to get the tools running on the Windows NT platform, Mentor enlisted the help of DataFocus, Inc. and its NuTCRACKER Unix plug-in for Windows. In an embedded technology license agreement, Mentor Graphics is using NuTCRACKER to enable 45 of its software products to run on Windows NT-based Intel workstations. The DataFocus software runs Unix and Windows applications natively together in a tightly integrated, high-performance Windows environment.