( ESNUG 568 Item 1 ) -------------------------------------------- [03/17/17]
Subject: SCOOP -- Credit Suisse rumors MENT PnR will be gone after merger
Mentor Nitro-SoC and Oasys-RTL -- are Wally's answer to Aart and
Anirudh in digital implementation. Oasys-RTL does crazy fast RTL
synthesis floorplanning, design partitioning, congestion analysis and
pre-CTS opto. 3 hours to synth & floorplan a 2 million inst chip
using 4G of machine memory. Can do 6 M inst flat. (ESNUG 560 #6)
Synthesized and floorplanned a 5.2 M inst customer chip flat, 16nm
TSMC, in 7 hours 48 minutes on a single thread. Does "place first"
where RTL is synthesized into a virtual physical partition and
optimized at RTL level. "Lets us do various What-If's that were
impossible before!"
This year Nitro-SoC claims 2.0M insts per 24 hrs, 5X CTS and placer
speedup, compact database, 5M inst block sizes. Dynamic area recovery
and FinFET power optimization gets "10% better area and power". Does
multi-patterning, native coloring, conflict resolution engines, direct
hooks with Calibre signoff. Abutted floorplanning with replication.
ST Micro, Samsung Nvidia, MediaTek, ImgTec are MENT Sierra/Oasys users.
(booth 949) Ask for Sudhakar Jilla. Freebie: USB cellphone charger
- "My Cheesy Must See List for DAC 2016"
From: [ John Cooley of DeepChip.com ]
Earlier this month, the MENT bigwigs gave their end-of-2016 MENT earnings
report -- which, incidently was their *final* earnings report because
everyone's all happy and expecting the Siemens/MENT merger to happen.
"MENT reported revenue of $478.0 million (+48% q/q) and pro-forma
EPS of $1.21, ahead of the Street mean of $414.4 million and $1.03,
respectively. Higher than expected revenues (driven largely by
Systems) drove the earnings upside in the quarter."
- Thomas Diffely, D.A. Davidson (03/03/2017)
"Mentor posted a substantial revenue beat. Due to the pending
acquisition by Siemens, Mentor Graphics did not host an earnings
call, and it is difficult to say what led to such a significant
beat."
- Monika Garg, Pacific Crest Securities (03/02/2017)
Other than one cite of Veloce sales boosting their 2016 bottom line, which
I'm sure made MENT's ever surly Jean-Marie Brunet happy (see ESNUG 567 #3),
there wasn't much "news" news in the Wall Street reports.
That was until I skimmed the Credit Suisse report.
"MENT disclosed ~$10 million of expenses related to restructuring.
Our checks suggest Mentor has shut down its Place and Route division
(Olympus-SoC tool) as it prepares for the Siemens merger."
- Farhan Ahmad, Credit Suisse (03/03/2017)
Holy crap! Farhan is saying that MENT's Sierra PnR acquisition is kaput!
On top of that, a little quick snooping turned up that MENT had also let go
Pravin Madhani, the former CEO of Sierra and (now former) GM of the Mentor
PnR division. I immediately called Pravin.
me: "Pravin! I just heard you got whacked from Mentor and
that they eliminated the entire PnR division!"
Pravin: "No, Sierra is still at Mentor. That rumor is wrong.
Yes, I'm gone from Mentor, though. I've been 10 years
at Mentor. I was talking with Greg and Wally about
leaving to do a start-up outside of EDA. And since
I was leaving, they used it as a time to do a reorg
in the PnR group. I recommended Shankar to replace
me as the new GM since he and I co-founded Sierra
together. He'll do a good job."
When I asked Pravin more about this new start-up, he said he can't talk on
it now, but in 3 weeks he could. (He was busy getting funding lined up.)
Later more rumors came in. A 3rd spy told me that the MENT PnR division
was NOT gone, "but they laid off 50% of their R&D." A 4th spy said the
same, but I couldn't tell if Spy 4 was just inadvertantly repeating what
Spy 3 had heard.
So I figured it was time to go to the new GM, Shankar Krishnamoorthy, and
directly ask him what was going on.
me: "Wall Street says that Mentor is killing Olympus. Is it true?"
Shankar: "What??!! Who said that? It's complete B.S.!!!"
me: "Credit Suisse said it directly in their MENT research note
of March 3, 2017."
Shankar: "They're wrong. They might have been confused by a program that
we are running to upgrade all Olympus users over to our next
gen P&R system. We quietly launched Nitro-SoC, Olympus's
successor in the 3rd quarter last year. Many of our customers
have already migrated from Olympus-SoC over to Nitro-SoC and
like its improved QoR and faster runtimes.
We had two of our early Nitro-SoC adopters, ST & Nvidia, present
at the Mentor U2U last year. At the upcoming 2017 U2U, in three
weeks we will have more customers (ARM, On Semi, Western Digital)
talking about using Mentor IC Implementation tools..."
me: "Some sources tell me that Mentor recently laid off 50% of
its Sierra developers. Is that right?"
Shankar: "John, the 50% number is NOT TRUE. In a 312 person engineering
team, 8 developers were scaled back from non-strategic product
areas. [pauses to do math] That's only a 3% cut.
I am proud and honored to lead a team that will keep giving
Anirudh and Aart serious competition in PnR."
me: "So you're saying Nitro-SoC is your answer to Innovus and ICC2?"
Shankar: "Yes. It's our next-generation PnR system. Given the recent IoT
and automotive trends, several new companies like Facebook,
Google, Amazon are entering the IC design space. ..."
me: "Whoa! Are you saying Google, Amazon, and Facebook are current
Nitro-SoC customers???!!!"
Shankar: "No. No. No. I'm using them as examples of software companies
that are now doing chip designs. Examples. Even if they were
customers, I would not be allowed to say they were.
Anyway... as I was saying before you blurted in, these software
companies going into chip design have serious time-to-market
pressures. They need easy-to-use/easy-to-adopt PnR tools. They
can not do the heavy customization and AE hand-holding needed
to get good QoR out of modern PnR tools.
Our Nitro PnR platform has been designed from the ground-up to
deliver good QoR with minimal customization and fast runtimes;
something the other modern PnR tools lack."
me: "Hmmm... 'modern PnR tools'... Just to be clear, you are meaning
both Innovus and ICC/ICC2 here, right?"
Shankar: [audible sigh] "Yes..."
me: "Is Pravin is no longer at Mentor?"
Shankar: "Yes, John. After 14 years with Sierra plus Mentor, Pravin
decided to move on to pursue his next start-up idea. I'm
going to miss him. After leaving Synopsys, we started
Sierra together."
me: "How did your Oasys synthesis acquisition pan out?"
Shankar: "John, we see good traction with Oasys at several customers.
Last year Samsung spoke about Oasys at our U2U. These types
of users want to de-risk PnR by analyzing physical congestion
and timing at the RTL design phase. Blah. Blah. Blah... It
can do 20M+ instance synthesis, automatic RTL floorplanning,
rapid PPA exploration,... blah, blah, blah... chip-level
RTL analysis, and partitioning... Blah. Blah. Blah..."
To be honest, I kind of tuned out once his Oasys spiel kicked in. My main
question of "is MENT dumping PnR?" was answered with a big "HELL, NO!" and
I was too distracted by other work deadlines. (I'll do Oasys talk on
another day.)
- John Cooley
DeepChip.com Holliston, MA
---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ---- ----
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