EDA industry is ‘red-hot’ right now, says Mentor CEO

According to Rhines, the EDA industry is following the semiconductor market out of recession with opportunities for growth this year. 

“We are in a very strong bounce back,” said Rhines.

“I expect Mentor Graphics to show 8% growth this year, said Rhines.

 The chip design tool industry draws its strength from the semiconductor market, which is forecast to bounce back with 25% growth or better his year. 

“The EDA industry normally lags the semiconductor industry,” said Rhines. “This is normally because revenues must grow back some before companies start re-investing in R&D.”

“8% is not stunning, but it’s OK,” said Rhines.

Rhines says growth will come from the company’s ability to offer new design capabilities in its tools.

“Demand for 32nm tools is growing so is design for manufacture and electronic system level design will be an important growth area for us,” said Rhines.

Another area which Rhines is excited by is the growing open –source semiconductor IP community.

“We have moved aggressively into this area with last year’s acquisition of Embedded Ally,” said Rhines.

Embedded Ally is a California-based provider of Linux, middleware and software for mobile and embedded devices.

“This has pushed us into the open source community,” said Rhines. 

Mentor has a number of Android, Linux, and Nucleus tools and runtime components which are supported by semiconductor partners, including ARM, Freescale, Marvell, MIPS, RMI, and Texas Instruments (TI).

Embedded Alley was the first to market commercial Android tools and services in May 2009, for the RMI Au1250 SoC and the MIPS architecture.

See: Mentor Joins $2.5bn Nano2012 Programme