Mentor Graphics

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Mentor Graphics <tr><td colspan="2" style="text-align:center; padding:16px 0 16px 0;">Image:Mentor logo.png</td></tr>
Type	Public
Founded	1981
Headquarters	Wilsonville, Oregon <tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Industry</th><td>EDA, Embedded Software</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Products</th><td>Nucleus RTOS, EDGE Development Tools</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Slogan</th><td>EDA technology leader</td></tr><tr><th style="text-align:right; padding-right:0.75em;">Website</th><td>mentor.com</td></tr>

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 helped create. The company, founded in 1981, is headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon, and employs 4000 people worldwide.

[edit] History

In 1981, the idea of computer-aided design for electronics as the foundation of a company occurred 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.

By February 1981, most of start-up team had been identified; by May the business plan was complete. The first round of money, $1 million, came from Sutter Hill, Greylock, and Venrock Associates. The next round was $2 million from five venture capital firms, and 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.

[edit] Products

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 acquired Accelerated Technology, Inc.)
  - VRTX (acquired in 1995 when Mentor bought Microtec Research.)
- Development Tools:
  - EDGE Developer Suite - Embedded development tools IDE (compilers, debugger, profiler, project manager)
  - EDGE SimTest - Virtual Prototyping, simulation and testing for embedded solutions
  - Next Device Engine (NDE) - Next Device was acquired by Mentor in 2006.
  - xtUML Design Tools: BridgePoint (acquired in a 2004 when Mentor acquired Project Technology.)
- VPN Solutions
  - Nucleus Point-to-Point Tunneling Protocol (PPTP) software
  - Nucleus NET networking stack
  - Nucleus implementation of the Microsoft Point-to-Point Encryption (MPPE) protocol
  - Nucleus PPP software
Simulation tools for analog mixed-signal design
- QuestaSim is an Advanced Verification platform supporting testbench automation, assertions and functional coverage
- 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.