( ESNUG 552 Item 1 ) -------------------------------------------- [10/08/15]
Subject: 46 readers on Calypto, Gary Smith, Veloce, Ansys, SNPS C Compiler
Way back in August 2011, DeepChip broke the news that Mentor was giving
its Catapult C away to help form Calypto. That was 4 years ago.
I've now heared rumors that last Friday (five days ago), Sanjiv Kaul sent
out an internal email to all 70 to 100 Calypto employees saying that
Calypto will be rejoining Mentor Graphics.
- from http://www.deepchip.com/items/0551-10.html
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"Congrats. It looks like you beat the Mentor press release
by 37 hours."
"Yes, Calypto is rejoining Mentor. Or as Brett would say
(before Forte was aquired by CDNS), Calypto never left
Mentor in the first place."
"Yet another Cooley scoop."
"All true. Letter went out to customers today so now it is
public. Shawn bought his options before he left, so at least
he made some money."
"Well done, John."
"It's no longer a rumor. It's been announced."
"Not rumor now. It's done!"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
GARY SMITH:
"I feel really bad for Gary Smith about this."
"This is sad. Gary Smith invested a lot of personal capital
into the dream of HLS, SVP, and the ESL design flow."
"I wish Gary was around to comment. This was his big vision."
"Having to see the last freestanding C-based EDA start-up fail
like this would have saddened Gary if he was around to see it."
HISTORY FOOTNOTE: Gary Smith was a very vocal -- we're talking more than
10 years -- proponent of High Level Synthesis (HLS), Silicon Virtual
Prototyping (SVP), and Electronic System Level (ESL) design -- which is a
fancypants way of saying doing chip design from the C level instead of
from a Verilog/VHDL RTL level.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
"Aart is not mentioning his Synfora Synphony C Compiler in his
SNUG keynotes because SNPS is quietly discontinuing this tool."
"C Compiler is in E-O-L. We're looking at either Catapult or
Stratus HLS to replace it."
"That's because Aart's sales team can't sell HLS. They had this
same problem 20 years ago during the Behavioral Compiler fiasco."
"Our CDNS account manager says that Stratus is the best of both
C2S and Cynthesizer."
"Your source on Forte is wrong. Forte was not sold to Cadence at
a discount. CDNS acquired it at $29 million; a 3X multiple of
revenues. This is a much better multiple than what Aart and
Lip-bu are currently paying for other EDA start-ups."
"Calypto had momentum. NVidea adopted Catapult HLS and HLS/LP.
Qualcomm was on board and continuing to buy Catapult licenses.
ARM and Samsung, too.
Mentor gets the EDA bargain of the year by folding in Calypto
right before the company, and employees, could capitalize on
their efforts - in some cases 11 years of dedication."
HISTORY FOOTNOTE: The references to SNPS Behavioral Compiler date back to
the late 1990's when Aart de Geus heavily pushed it as a high level synth
tool that was (at the time) the "future of all coming chip design".
"I do not believe the Synopsys advertisements about the
performance and results of its Behavioural Compiler."
- David Barda of CAST Laboratory (1997 ESNUG 263 #1)
It was a bit embarrassing for Aart because he had pushed BC for 3 years, yet
the tool failed to get any traction with his customer base at the time.
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
"This is unfair to Andrew Yang. It wasn't his fault. He had to
deal with the restrictions that Cashman gave him. Andrew honored
the Apache buyout as best as one could."
"Does this mean that the Ansys Power App deal using PowerArtist
with Mentor Veloce 2 is now dead?"
"Is Veloce Power App cancelled?"
"So are the MENT Veloce boxes discontinuing PowerArtist in favor
of Calypto PowerPro?"
"Q: How does this impace Veloce Power App?"
"Why did Veloce team up with Ansys in the first place?"
"Just when the Calypto-Broadcom deal is about to happen. It was
in the works for several months. It was to be one of the largest
PowerPro deals Calypto has ever had - and Mentor decides to pull
the trigger on them."
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
And for special technology, Calypto SLEC is the chip design world's only
commercial sequential equivalence checker. All the other LEC tools like
Cadence Verplex Conformal or Synopsys Formality are combinational only. They don't handle state transitions in a design. And
since C-based design is state-intentive, sequential EC is needed there.
- from http://www.deepchip.com/items/0551-10.html
|
"Hey, John,
You mention that Calypto has the only sequential EC tool around.
Well, OneSpin has a powerful Sequential EC tool, OneSpin 360 EC,
that we at Xilinx use extensively. It is a technology that
should not be ignored!"
"You might want to look at OneSpin in Munich as an alternative
to Calypto LEC."
"I think Cadence R&D was working on sequential LEC for Conformal a
few years ago but may have dropped it."
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Although rejoining Daddy MENT is mostly just an org chart change (since MENT
already has a 51% stake in Calypto), I still don't 100% believe this rumor.
Sanjiv even got a Catapult business deal with Google and Google even let
Calypto publically brag about it??? (How often does Google let *anyone* use their name for *anything*???)
- from http://www.deepchip.com/items/0551-10.html
|
"To get Google to endorse Calypto was a victory for all EDA.
In the valley no one knows what EDA is."
"Did Calypto get any money from Google? I heard what killed
Calyto as a standalone co was it wasn't profitable."
"Catapult is a niche product that works for FPGA-based designs,
like Google's application. It's main competition is Vivado,
aka AutoESL."
"Sanjiv did a pretty good job with only 30 months as CEO.
Getting Google was a prize. Aart nor Lip-bu nor Wally
can't claim Google. At least not publically."
"I'll wager that Doug Aitelli made more money from being
booted to Atrenta than Kaul did by replacing Doug."
"At a minimum, it might have been helpful to keep Sanjiv Kaul
around. Sanjiv put the company on the right track and in
the spotlight with market makers like Broadcom and Google.
Good luck! So far, so poorly handled. Where is Synopsys
when someone needs it?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
My sources also say that after the deal is closed, Badru Agarwala, the
former CEO of Axiom -- which got acquired by MENT in 2013 -- will be the
new GM in charge of the Mentor Calypto business unit. My guess is that the
"Calypto" name will probably very quickly go away, but that Catapult, SLEC,
and PowerPro will keep being called what they're called now.
- from http://www.deepchip.com/items/0551-10.html
|
"Yeap, it's true. Just announced by Wally today. (Including
the news of Badru heading the group)."
"Badru Aggarwal was a director at Mentor before being promoted
to GM for the now Calypto Business Unit. His previous experience
has been in R&D, and as CEO of a 12 people company.
Calypto is -- or was -- 135 employees."
"Pretty good leak there. You even got Badru's name!"
"Your guess is wrong. Calypto will be the name of the MENT BU
that Aggarwal is heading."
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
The conjecture my sources give for this MENT/Calypto reabsorption is that
since Cadence sales is getting some traction pushing their Forte Cynthesizer
C-to-Silicon HLS, Mentor wants their own sales team doing the same with
Catapult HLS. The idea is to take advantage of Synopsys' weakness in
HLS/SystemC/ANSI C++ synthesis.
- from http://www.deepchip.com/items/0551-10.html
|
"Sanjiv Kaul was removed because the Mentor spin-out agreement
was about to hit a higher price point."
"They pulled it back into Mentor because there was no upside for
anyone at Calypto, and everyone knew it. Sanjiv had no currency
to attract or retain people with, since the deal with Mentor
allowed Mentor to purchase Calypto at a predetermined, low, price
pretty much whenever they wanted to.
This meant that Calypto could never be sold to anyone else (Mentor
had controlling interest), and Mentor couldn't be forced to pay a
market price."
"Mentor is to pay 1.8x revenue if/when they acquired the remainder
of Calypto. And since Mentor owned 51% of Calypto, the other
shareholders only got 49% of that."
"Nice article, John. Sanjiv was doing all the right things to get
Calypto successful but the terms of reacquisition were going to
go up if Mentor did not do this now."
"I've heard Calypto was growing 12% per year. Maybe Greg Hinckley
wanted that growth under MENT's ledger?"
"With options at $0.04 on the low side, and $0.10 on the high end;
most employees made $0.03 per share and many are under water.
Surely it was just business for Mentor Graphics, but the timing
was a win-loose scenario, where the employees who made it happen
are the people who gained the least."
"Mentor needs Calypto to compete with Cadence in the HLS world, and
they needed PowerPro technology to complement Veloce. Now they
have both -- and along with unhappy shareholders -- including the
120 Calypto employees they just acquired."
"Mentor laid off the few marketing folks Calypto had, losing the
only product marketing expertise that can support Calypto products.
If Mentor was not able to pull off the development and effective
marketing and sales of their Catapult products 4 years ago, what
makes them think they can do it now?"
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
Related Articles
Mentor rumored to have traded its Catapult C division for Calypto
Calypto finally spells out the details behind Catapult C merger
Cadence to acquire Forte Cynthesizer at a rumored fire sale price
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