| Revision as of 01:01, 29 March 2006 editChounder (talk | contribs)172 editsNo edit summary← Previous edit | Revision as of 01:06, 29 March 2006 edit undoChounder (talk | contribs)172 editsNo edit summaryNext edit → | ||
| Line 7: | Line 7: | ||
| HISTORY | ==HISTORY== | ||
| Mentor Graphics - How it Started: Capital Ideas | Mentor Graphics - How it Started: Capital Ideas | ||
| Line 63: | Line 62: | ||
| ==TIMELINE== | |||
| MENTOR GRAPHIC HISTORICAL TIME LINE | |||
| FEBRUARY 1981 - Most of start-up team identified | FEBRUARY 1981 - Most of start-up team identified | ||
| Line 69: | Line 68: | ||
| MAY 1981 - Business Plan completed | MAY 1981 - Business Plan completed | ||
| ==PRODUCT AREAS== | |||
| The company distributes the following tools. | The company distributes the following tools. | ||
| *] for | *] for | ||
Revision as of 01:06, 29 March 2006
You must add a |reason= parameter to this Cleanup template – replace it with {{Cleanup|reason=<Fill reason here>}}, or remove the Cleanup template.
Mentor Graphics, Inc (Nasdaq: MENT) is a US-based multinational corporation dealing in electronic design automation (EDA) for electrical engineering and electronics, as of 2004, ranked third in the EDA industry it help create.
HISTORY
Mentor Graphics - How it Started: Capital Ideas
A venture capitalist offered the advise, "Startup investors are attracted by good people making a good product for a growing market." That wisdom, as much as any served as the foundation for the company Mentor Graphics would become.
The founding engineers, whose backgrounds were in software development, ruled out designing and manufacturing proprietary computers to run their software applications because they felt that hardware was going to become a commodity owned by big computer companies. Instead they would select an existing computer system as the hardware platform for the CAE programs they would build.
The business plan presented to the financiers revealed that the team had found a market of rich potential and all the other necessary ingredients for success. "The Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) business is a superset of the CAD/CAM industry," the document began. "We can define computer aided engineering products as equipment and software which enable an engineer to improve…productivity, work quality and consistency. The plan noted "rapid growth" in CAD/CAM "and to an even greater degree in the emerging special purpose workstation environment." Driving forces in the field were identified as "a shortage of both engineers and trained technicians, and the push for productivity and quality in basic manufacturing industries."
The first round of money, $1 million, came from three of the most prestigious venture capital firms in the country: Sutter Hill of Palo Alto, Greylock of Boston and Venrock Associates of New York. These firms had financed such giants of high technology as Apple and Intel. The combined power of their participation produced another $2 million from Hambrecht & Quist, L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg and Towbin, and Lamereaux and Glynn by the summer of 1982. In April 1983, the original investors and nine new ones put another $7 million into Mentor Graphics. Thus, Mentor Graphics became the first company to attract world-class venture capital to Oregon.
Mentor Graphics - How it Started: The Hardware Choice
Choosing the best hardware on which to base the software was the next big step to take. While there were a range of options available, from Apple to "would-be" Apples, Apollo computer seemed to be the best choice.
Based in Chelmsford, Massachusetts, Apollo was less than a year old and had only announced itself to the public a few weeks before the founders of Mentor Graphics began their initial meetings.
At that time, Apollo's product only consisted of specifications on paper. But the team knew of the Apollo founders and knew they had a proven track record in computer design. From what they read, the Apollo computer would be unlike anything in the marketplace. It would combine the time-sharing capabilities of a mainframe computer with the raw processing power of a dedicated minicomputer. Each Apollo computer could stand alone as a powerful 32-bit general purpose workstation. Alternatively, a theoretically unlimited number of Apollos could be linked together to share information directly, avoiding the potential bottleneck of passing data through a mainframe. Apollo called this concept the Domain network.
In March, 1981, Apollo was only a promise, both as a product and as a company. Would the company deliver? Would it deliver on time? Would it back what it built? Would it be around tomorrow? Wouldn't it make more sense to go with an established and respected computer company like Hewlett-Packard or Digital Equipment Corporation?
It would have been very difficult to put a start-of-the-art CAE product on any other workstation. So Mentor Graphics went with Apollo.
Mentor Graphics - How it Started: The Birth of CAE
The Mentor Graphics team had arrived at the product it would manufacture by surveying engineers across the country as to their most significant needs. That was how they made the decision to go into CAE and, specifically to wed software for engineering design functions to a workstation. Mentor Graphics then continued to survey engineers for information about the most desirable features of CAE capability. This was to be a critical advantage Mentor Graphics would enjoy in the competition against the companies that developed as its main rivals - Daisy Systems and Valid Logic.
When Mentor entered the CAE market the company had two technical differentiators: The first was that Daisy and Valid Logic had "productized" software packages originally designed for other purposes. Valid Logic employed SCALD, a program developed at Lawrence Livermore Labs. Daisy's engineers had "front-ended" - that is, added steps to- a computer-aided design package. The difference between CAD and CAE were sufficiently distinct that prospective buyers saw Daisy's software as a hybrid and Valid Logic's as useful but not completely responsive to users' needs. Mentor, on the other hand, had designed its software from scratch, listening closely to what potential buyers told them about the special requirements of CAE. Engineers were impressed with the responsiveness of the software.
Mentor's second advantage stemmed from the decision to use Apollo hardware as its platform. The state-of-the-art in CAE, such as it was, was based on the use of mainframe, timeshare CAD systems. There were severe weaknesses in this method. They were cumbersome and time-consuming to use. The graphics were not of the best quality. The Mentor Graphics simulator ran on a workstation instead of a mainframe, and was "interactive" so that, for the first time, an engineer could control the simulation as it ran.
Targeting DAC 1982 for the product announcement, the company had less than a year from the time the engineers started in July 1981 to demonstrate capabilities no one else had been able to produce. Specifying the software tools began in the fall, after an initial period of learning the new Apollo computers that had arrived in August. What should happen was a matter of dispute when it came to product specs. The dispute boiled down to "technical excellence" versus "what customers need." Engineering argued for technically superior products, while marketing argued for products that customers needed and would buy. The synthesis produced something much better than would have been produced otherwise. The end result was a product that was technically formidable and also marketable.
Conceiving a product was one thing, designing it another. Then there was building it. When 1982 rolled around, it was "put up or shut up". DAC was less than six months away, and as it turned out, literally every minute was needed for the company to produce software to demonstrate in Las Vegas. Hours and hours of work would lie ahead for the engineers. Thousands of lines of software code had to be written, programs had to be tested, and bugs had to be detected and fixed.
Everybody at Mentor was performing heroically to set the stage for the company's first big public test. The product Mentor wanted to unveil, the system that came to be known as the IDEA 1000, was unprecedented. The Mentor Graphics team was trying to conceptualize, design and build a computer to build other computers. There was extant software for designing and simulating electronic circuitry, but the idea of integrating these two functions in a single database so that an engineer could sit at a single station and design both elements on one computer using one program was revolutionary. Before this development, schematics had been drawn by hand or "captured" on a computer. To simulate the design information the engineer had to use a mainframe. The idea of using a workstation in the Mentor Graphics configuration, the carefully selected Apollo machine, was a true innovation, one that promised great freedom and savings of time and money for engineering staff.
Mentor Graphics - How it Started: DAC 1982
As important as DAC is for Mentor Graphics today, it was practically of life-and-death magnitude in 1982. The company had a goal of shipping products by the fall of that year; to wait longer would be to risk jeopardizing an invaluable opportunity to blaze the trail in this new CAE market.
The Mentor Graphics team crafted an unusual strategy for DAC, partly from necessity, partly out of shrewdness. The engineers were working overtime to turn the software into a single integrated system. All they had as the conference neared were pieces of a puzzle. They weren't sure the completed product would be ready by the date of the conference. A decision was made not to buy space on the convention hall floor, but to visit with participants in a hotel suite and give small demonstrations there.
It wasn't until early June that the engineers began the task of integrating all the various software pieces into a single system and actually testing the applications. Leading up to DAC, the engineers were keeping track of problems on wrapping paper that extended from the ceiling to the floor in their conference room. As a bug was fixed, it was scratched off the list. There were new versions of the system being generated almost hourly. Every person who got on a plane for DAC carried floppy disks with the latest software.
Parlaying a May 27, Electronic Design cover story on Mentor Graphics into a marketing tool, the team went to work. Around 4 a.m. on the Monday morning before DAC officially opened, the magazine article reprints, along with an invitation to the Mentor Graphics suite, were being slipped under hotel room doors at Caesar's Palace. Unable to determine which rooms the DAC attendees were staying in, the invitations were passed out indiscriminately. Vacationers and conference-goers alike were invited.
Attendees began to trickle into the suite Monday morning for demonstrations. After the first presentations, word spread quickly through the exhibition floor that were was a company showing something never seen before - interactive simulation - in a hotel suite. By the close of DAC nearly a third to half of the 1,200 attendees had visited the suite and many were so impressed they wanted to buy a Mentor Graphics workstation immediately.
Mentor Graphics was on its way to being an industry leader in the new market of CAE.
TIMELINE
FEBRUARY 1981 - Most of start-up team identified
MAY 1981 - Business Plan completed
PRODUCT AREAS
The company distributes the following tools.
- Electronic design automation for
- Integrated circuits
- FPGA
- Embedded systems
- Schematic editors for electronic schematics such as Design Architect IC or DxDesigner
- Layout tools for printed circuit boards with programs such as PADS, Expedition and Board Station
- Component library management tools
- Intellectual property blocks for ASIC and FPGA designs
- Embedded systems Development
- real-time operating systems
- Nucleus RTOS (acquired in 2002 when Mentor bought Accelerated Technology Inc.)
- VRTX (acquired in 1995 when Mentor bought Microtec Research.)
- Development Tools:
- real-time operating systems
- Simulation tools for analog mixed-signal design
- ModelSim is a popular hardware simulation and debug environment
- Eldo is a high performance SPICE simulator
- Mach TA is a fast SPICE simulator
- Advance MS is a mixed-signal verification tool
- Falcon Framework a software application framework for Apollo/Domain and Unix
- AMPLE a scripting language for the Falcon Framework
Mentor has software development sites located around the world but the majority of their developers are located in the United States.
James "Jim" Ready, one of the more colorful people in embedded systems, left Mentor in 1999 to form the embedded Linux company MontaVista. Neil Henderson, a pioneer in the royalty-free, source provided market space, joined Mentor Graphics in 2002 with the acquisition of Accelerated Technology Inc. Stephen Mellor, a leader in the UML space and co-originator of the Shlaer-Mellor design methodology, joined Mentor Graphics in 2004 with the acquisition of Project Technology.
As of 2005, Mentor's major competitors are Cadence Design Systems, Synopsys, and Magma Design Automation.