Mentor and Sierra agrees on Merger Deal

Graphics Corporation today announced it has acquired Sierra Design Automation (Santa Clara, Calif.), a provider of high-performance place and route solutions. The company was purchased for $90 million, payable 50 percent in cash and 50 percent in Mentor Graphics common stock. “Combining Mentor's market-leading design-for-manufacturing (DFM) capabilities with Sierra's proven variability and lithography-driven place and route solution gives our customers the edge they need to achieve rapid design closure with high yield," said Pravin Madhani, president and CEO, Sierra Design Automation. “At 65 and 45 nanometers (nm), discontinuities such as process variation, design size, low power and DFM are creating a major disruption in physical design. The merger with Mentor enables us to deliver a powerful design-to-fab flow that addresses these discontinuities in a comprehensive fashion." “Mentor's success with the Calibre product was built upon recognizing a market discontinuity and capitalizing on it. We see the same type of discontinuity happening in this market," said Walden C. Rhines, CEO and chairman, Mentor Graphics. “Our leading-edge customers are telling us that they need a design-to-fab flow capable of handling dozens of process corners and multiple modes, all while addressing manufacturability challenges to achieve manufacturing closure of their designs. Mentor's and Sierra's leadership in these areas make us a natural fit. The acquisition of Sierra expands Mentor's leadership in DFM, and provides the integration that customers need between physical design, and back-end verification and yield-enhancement." "STMicroelectronics is designing some of the world's most complex chips and is aggressively pursuing advanced process geometries with 65 and 45 nm designs in production and in progress today," said Philippe Magarshack, Group Vice President, Central CAD General Manager, STMicroelectronics. "We decided to partner with Mentor and Sierra 18 months ago to address critical discontinuities that we identified in the design flow including low-power, design for variability and manufacturing. We are very impressed with the quality of the results of this partnership, which allows us to blend manufacturability know-how into the physical synthesis and routing phase." Sierra's flagship Olympus-SoC product delivers innovative technologies for 65 and 45 nm processes. It provides the next-generation place and route system that concurrently addresses variations in lithography, process corners and design modes. Integral to Olympus-SoC is Sierra's detailed routing architecture which embeds variation-aware timing, optimization and litho-modeling to address optical proximity correction (OPC) and resolution enhancement technology (RET) effects early in the design cycle ensuring faster timing closure for complex process rules. It is capable of simultaneously solving for dozens of different process corners and design modes, ensuring an optimized chip without unnecessary guard banding. Mentor Graphics will continue to sell and support Sierra's products through its global sales and support organizations.