Mentor Graphics� is a technology leader in electronic design automation
(EDA), providing software and hardware design solutions that enable companies
to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. The
company offers innovative products and solutions that help engineers overcome
the design challenges they face in the increasingly complex worlds of board and
chip design. Mentor Graphics has the broadest industry portfolio of
best-in-class products and is the only EDA company with an embedded software
solution.
Publicly held (NASDAQ:
MENT)
Founded 1981,
headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon
4,000 employees
Revenue in last reported
12 months: approximately $700 million
World-class research and
development - 28 engineering sites worldwide
High-touch, global
distribution channel - 48 sales offices around the world
Strategic partnerships
with leading electronics manufacturers, semiconductor and electronic
design suppliers for development of new design solutions and methodologies
Scalable Verification
Mentor Graphics provides its customers with critical tools for solving the
increasingly complicated problems of verifying that today�s complex chip
designs actually function as intended. Functional errors at the system level
are the leading cause of design revisions affecting time to market and
profitability. Design teams must improve existing methodologies with tools that
scale across design complexity and multiple levels of abstraction. The Mentor
Graphics Scalable Verification� platform is the most comprehensive EDA solution
for functional verification, merging standards support, tools and a �design for
verification� methodology to minimize verification cycles and design revisions.
This solution provides the industry�s best language support and the most
complete path for verification, from hardware description language (HDL)
simulation to in-circuit emulation, including support for testbenches,
assertions and functional prototypes. Mentor offers standards-based support for
the most advanced verification requirements with integrated technologies now
including the 0-In� assertion-based verification tools and methodologies to
enable comprehensive verification throughout the entire design.
The Scalable Verification platform is comprised of �best-in-class�
technologies: the ModelSim� simulation environment, Seamless� Hardware/Software
Co-Verification, ADVanceMS� for analog/mixed-signal verification, FormalPro�
equivalence checking and the VStation� and Celaro� hardware emulation
platforms.
Design to Silicon In advanced process technologies the handoff between integrated circuit
(IC) layout and manufacturing has changed. In previous technologies, the
handoff was a simple check when the design went to manufacturing. Now it is a
multi-step process where the layout database is modified so the design can be
manufactured. This presents a host of challenges. Issues arise concerning
manufacturing process effects, photolithography, data volumes and achieving a
cost-effective yield of finished chips from each wafer.
To meet these challenges with confidence, design teams turn to the
integrated Calibre� design-to-silicon platform from Mentor Graphics, which
includes physical verification, full-chip, transistor-level parasitic
extraction, design for manufacturability (DFM), mask data preparation (MDP) and
resolution enhancement technologies (RET). Every facet of the design-to-silicon
transition is efficiently and accurately managed by the Calibre product family.
Moving to ever smaller geometries and new process materials causes a
fundamental shift in the physical defect spectrum in silicon manufacturing. The
Mentor Graphics TestKompress� embedded deterministic test tool helps companies
efficiently screen complex devices to identify the new types of failures, while
simultaneously reducing the cost of test.
Integrated PCB-FPGA Systems Design As ICs, ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) and FPGAs
(field-programmable gate arrays) become more complex and printed circuit board
(PCB) fabrication technology advances to include embedded components and
high-density interconnect layers, the design of PCBs is reaching new levels of
complexity. These are frequently a source of design bottlenecks. Mentor
Graphics is the market and technology leader in PCB design, providing many of
the world�s largest system design companies today with a range of scalable
design solutions to reduce the time, cost and risk of electronic system design:
the Expedition� Series, for the creation of today�s most complex PCB designs;
the Board Station� family, the market standard solution for the PCB design
challenges of the global enterprise; and the PADS� flow, the leading
Windows-based solution for complex PCB design.
Mentor Graphics also offers solutions for specific design challenges such as
high-speed routing and verification advanced packaging, concurrent team design,
FPGA-on-board integration and design data management.
New and Emerging Products
C-Based Design
Design complexity of next-generation digital signal processing (DSP)
applications is outgrowing the capabilities of current design methods.
Increasingly, designs are large systems that include embedded cores, IP, and
complex hardware that implements computationally intensive algorithms.
Traditional hardware implementation of these computationally intensive blocks
requires many manual steps which are inevitably error-prone. The Catapult C
Synthesis product from Mentor Graphics is a customer-proven algorithmic
synthesis environment using pure C++ language to describe functional intent.
This enables engineering teams to produce reliable ASIC or FPGA hardware that
is up to 50 percent smaller in size, in a significantly reduced amount of time.
Catapult C Synthesis unites the system-level and hardware design domains and,
combined with the Mentor Graphics ModelSim� simulator, lays the foundation for
next-generation electronic system level (ESL) design.
Electrical Systems and Harness Design A new car now contains 15 percent more electronics than the models of one
year ago, in entertainment, navigation and safety systems. As the electrical
wiring systems in the transportation industry become increasingly complex, so
the need for software solutions to manage this complexity grows. Mentor
Graphics offers an unrivalled range of leading-edge solutions being used by
OEMs and wire harness manufacturers throughout the world. Mentor's Capital
Harness� Systems is a powerful design environment developed specifically for
the wire harness industry, providing a data-centric tool suite for electrical
systems and associated harness design.
Embedded Systems Design Most electronics products today are a synthesis of hardware design and
embedded software, and the embedded software is the main differentiator for
product functionality and performance. As a result, embedded software has
increased dramatically in electronic systems design. Mentor Graphics is the
only EDA company to offer design solutions for embedded software. Mentor's Nucleus�
software development platform offers a source code with no royalty fees, a
real-time operating system (RTOS) and a fully integrated development system.
This means that embedded software tools can be developed and tested at the same
time as hardware, and can be debugged simultaneously. Furthermore, the
simultaneous development enables a "design-in" reliability so that
good architectural decisions can be made in both hardware and software
development.
Platform-Based Design The growing complexity of systems-on-chips, including increased
complexity in commercial blocks of intellectual property (IP) blocks, creates
challenges in optimizing the interfaces between a core microprocessor and its
peripherals. Platform-based methodology involves building and configuring a
design around a stable core platform and connecting by means of standard buses
which have been optimized for use with the processor core. The Platform
Express� environment from Mentor Graphics verifies the viability of interfaces
in the portion of the design surrounding the embedded processor and its
attached peripherals. By automating tedious and error-prone design creation and
verification steps, Platform Express shortens product development cycles and
allows designers to focus on product differentiators.
Consulting, Services and Support Mentor Graphics global customer support organization offers leading
customer support solutions online, by phone and in-person, to ensure that
customers can find answers to their questions at any hour of the day or night
from anywhere in the world. The company's "customer first" approach
has resulted in Mentor Graphics being the only EDA company to achieve Support
Center Practices (SCP) certification and be an unprecedented five-time winner
of the Software Technical Assistance Recognition (STAR) Award from the Service
and Support Professionals Association.
Mentor Consulting is an expert in electronic design infrastructures and
methodology services and is the only service partner in the industry that
invests in the transfer of knowledge to its customers. Their solutions are used
worldwide by forward-looking electronics companies to optimize design
productivity and advance adoption of the latest industry design best practices.
Education Services is focused on developing and delivering quality training
to help customers assimilate new tools and technologies into their design
environments, increasing productivity and ensuring success in the marketplace.
Mentor Graphics, Seamless, ModelSim, Calibre, TestKompress, Board Station, PADS
and Nucleus are registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation.
ADVanceMS, Celaro, Catapult C Synthesis, FormalPro, VStation , Expedition,
Platform Express and Capital Harness are trademarks of Mentor Graphics
Corporation.
The Automotive Industry�s
most comprehensive set of electrical and electronic (E/E) design solutions
Premium member of AUTOSAR,
the standards organization working to create an open standard for
automotive engineering architecture
Strategic alliances and
relationships with other key suppliers to the automotive industry such as
UGS, Mathworks, and Dassault Syst�mes
A worldwide team of
industry experts in electrical and electronic (E/E) design solutions and
methodologies
Customers include nearly
all the leading Automotive OEMs and Tier 1 suppliers around the world
Consulting Services
Mentor Consulting is the EDA expert in design
infrastructure and methodology services and is the only service partner in the
industry that invests in the transfer of knowledge to its customers. Our
extensive knowledge of both electronic design and EDA allows us to work with
your current tool suite, whether you have Mentor Graphics tools or not. It is
our mission to provide the methodologies, infrastructure, and IP services that
meet the critical design productivity needs of our customers.
