( ESNUG 555 Item 2 ) -------------------------------------------- [01/22/16]
Subject: Sawicki on MENT acquiring Tanner and Berkeley Design Automation
DAC'15 Troublemakers Panel in San Francisco, CA
Cooley: Joe.
Sawicki: Yes, sir.
Cooley: Why did Mentor buy Tanner?
Sawicki: You know we do a lot of acquisitions that are not about,
well, we don't do any acquisitions because we think the industry
is doing a full flow. It's just not our space. We're into the
people who choose tools, they need them integrated with anyone,
we're kind of..
Cooley: But Tanner's the cheap seats.
Sawicki: I am getting there!
Cooley: OK.
Sawicki: And so what we end up doing at times is tool acquisitions
purely based upon what we think are interesting opportunities to
give a different scale to the company. Tanner goes into a market
where a traditional EDA company doesn't go after those customers
because they're small. Their marketing organization was one guy
with a fax machine. We've got a machine in terms of the ability
to do low touch marketing and we think we can scale them larger.
There's some interesting plays on the technology side, where IoT
perhaps where as a platform is well made. But frankly we just
think we can scale the business faster than they can scale it on
their own. The former owner is looking for an exit event to move
off to different things. It works out well.
Cooley: Wouldn't that not cannibalize your scale for your higher
end tools?
Sawicki: No
Cooley: Why not?
Sawicki: Well the customer, I mean if you look at the customer...
Anirudh: They have no sales in the higher end.
Cooley: What's that? Say again?
Dean: He said they have no sales for the higher end tools
so there's nothing to cannibalize. [ laughter ]
Sawicki: [ joking back ] I think we have 3 customers that
use PBS and IC Station.
Sawicki: No no there's a list of customers that we don't go
after. They're smaller houses. They're universities that
are trying to commercialization products. They're small
garage shops. They're small places inside systems houses;
it's a completely different customer list.
Amit: So we see it as another interesting acquisition from
Mentor. It continues a theme. First BDA, now with Tanner.
We've seen them go from minimal market share and analog
custom IC design space to being a major player.
Cooley: Tanner?
Amit: Well, Mentor in general, first with BDA. They've
probably got you know 120 customers. With Tanner, you know
how many customers did Tanner have.
Sawicki: A lot, different ones.
Cooley: Well I think BDA, buying BDA was smart.
Amit: No I'm saying in general it's continuing to grow their
analog mixed signal position.
Anirudh: Well, let's not get too excited here, right. So...
Cooley: Anirudh, are you missing that you didn't buy Tanner?
Anirudh: So I think you know analog is, of course, a very big
area and mixed signal becomes very important. So having a
number of customers is not indicator of success. So even
with BDA, I talked to BDA before. If you add up the 120
customers, you have to see how much revenue they were making.
And also analog is not just vanilla stuff you have to do.
It's a lot of things in mixed signal, in IOT, embedded flash,
micro controllers, you have wireless.
So it has to be real innovation in the analog mixed signal
tools, not just buying some low end whatever Tanner tools
provides. That doesn't give a real differentiation...
Amit: Are you saying BDA didn't have innovation?
Anirudh: I'm saying that BDA does not dramatically change the
game in pure SPICE. This is what I believe.
They have some customers -- but you have to look at what is
the share with particular customers. The majority of these
customers are the majority Spectre APS customers. And what
I'm trying to say that for mixed signal you need innovation
to do analog and digital together to do floorplanning together,
to do timing across analog and digital boundaries. So just
having a low end solution is not a real advantage in IOT or
anything.
Amit: So that's how we saw BDA winning, and now Mentor
winning evaluations and design slots in simulations -- so
it's real innovation.
Sawicki: Shhhh. [ about Anirudh ] I like him not worried.
Anirudh should not worry about BDA at all. These are not
the clones you are looking for. [ audience laughs ]
Anirudh: We worry about all competition. But let's not get
ahead of ourselves.
Cooley: I thought Amit was saying some very interesting stuff
about BDA having innovation countering what you were saying
about them not.
Anirudh: I think that...
Amit: You've got to have innovation these days to be able to
win business with these large customers who have all-you-can-eat
Spectre seats or HSPICE seats. To be able come in with a new
tool, you have to have differentiation.
Anirudh: I'm not saying that. Of course they are getting business,
so that's good. What I'm saying is that doesn't dramatically
change the landscape in pure circuit simulation.
Hogan: I forgot the question.
Cooley: Jim, Jim I've heard.
Gary: ... when the buy first went down the quote I handed out
was that while most of EDA vendors are looking for the IoT market,
Mentor just walked in the back door.
Cooley: You're talking about the Tanner purchase or BDA purchase?
Gary: Tanner.
Cooley: Really?
Gary: Oh yeah. If you look at the seats held by the various
companies, the ones that are going to be doing IOT, they're
using Tanner tools today.
Cooley: That's going to be like a remote control for your
refrigerator.
Gary: That's right. And that's what Tanner can do hands down.
Why do you need anything more than that? And Tanner's actually
a damn good tool set. But Tanner has covered that market and
dominated that market for, oh, a good 20 years. So Mentor just
bought a major market.
Cooley: Jim? You know a little about SPICE and analog stuff.
Hogan: Yeah, I might have done something.
Cooley: Who's right here on the BDA purchase?
Hogan: Well, I think BDA was great for Mentor, right? Because
it provided them with a simulator that was great technology
10 years ago that could allow them to go after mixed signal and
analog markets where they had done well. And BDA also provided
Mentor with a memory solution that they were just entering. So
it was good purchase for Mentor, I think.
Cooley: But who's winning?
Hogan: Cadence is winning. Look, they own 60% to 70% of the
market place. I know that's the way I say win, right? So
yeah, it's great that some other people are picking up the
market share, but the market is expanding.
What Amit and I talk about occasionally is when I look at his
numbers how much, how fast actually, I was surprised how fast
the analog mixed signal market continues to grow. What's the
compounded growth rate of that? About 25 percent?
Amit: Yeah it's about 25 percent.
Cooley: That's 25 percent compound.
Hogan: Yeah, I was surprised by that. I though that the digital
market would grow a lot faster, and memory would grow a lot
faster. But what we're seeing in his numbers is about 25% on
mixed signal and analog.
Anirudh: And that growth is in two areas, right? So either is in
extreme low nodes analog at 10 nanometers -- which require
very complicated analog solutions -- or it is in mixed signal
at 28nm or 40 nanometer where you are integrating flash and
digital and analog power management together -= and these are
not easy designs to do.
So the growth is not one guy who can push a button on a PC and
design analog blocks. The growth is in high end analog or
mixed signal.
Hogan: One can see it. Let's take a phone, an iPhone. There's
a reason they don't put everything on the same chip, right?
And it's separated at opposite ends of the board that the
phone is actually on. So this notion that we had 10 years ago
where we would integrate mixed signal and analog RF on the
same chip as the digital thing -- it went by the wayside,
because it was just impossible to do.
So what we're seeing, is that even on advanced things like
cell phones that they're back a couple generations in terms
of process technology. Digital guys are on the leading edge.
Join
Index
Next->Item
|
|
