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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
In 1981, the idea of computer aided design as the foundation of a company occured to several groups - those who founded Mentor, Valid Logic Systems, and Daisy Systems. One of the main distinctions between these groups was that the founding engineers of Mentor, whose backgrounds were in software development at Tektronix, ruled out designing and manufacturing proprietary computers to run their software applications. They felt that hardware was going to become a commodity owned by big computer companies, so instead they would select an existing computer system as the hardware platform for the Computer Aided Engineering (CAE) programs they would build.
The first round of money, $1 million, came from Sutter Hill, Greylock, and Venrock Associates. The next round was $2 million from Hambrecht & Quist, L.F. Rothschild, Unterberg and Towbin, and Lamereaux and Glynn by the summer of 1982. In April 1983, a third round raised $7 million more. Mentor Graphics was one of the first companies to attract venture capital to Oregon.
Apollo computers were chosen as the hardware. 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.
When Mentor entered the CAE market the company had two technical differentiators. The first was the software - Mentor, Valid, and Daisy each had software with different strengths and weaknesses. The second was the hardware - Mentor ran all programs on the Apollo workstation, while Daisy and Valid each built their own hardware for schematic capture, but ran simulation and other programs on larger computers such as the MicroVax.
After a frenzied development, the IDEA 1000 product was introduced at the 1982 Design Automation Conference, though in a suite and not on the floor.
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
- IP cores 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.