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Automotives holds options for EDA: Mentor

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CIOL Bureau
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SAN JOSE: Mentor Graphics executives are of the view that automotives still holds out development options for EDA with the arrival of hybrid and electric vehicles.



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A brief glance in the rear view mirror points to previous year's Design Automation Conference (DAC). In an important speech, Walden Rhines, Mentor's chairman and CEO, then outlined that there are a lot of other industries to tap with EDA tools: "The military, aerospace, automotive, medical areas are all lagging in the use of automated design tools."



With the latest advertising of Serge Leef to the position of VP of latest ventures, Mentor materialized its objective to develop the company into markets next to EDA.

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Leef said his "main goal would be to take technologies we have and utilize them to tackle troubles outside of EDA in markets such as automotive, medical device, etc." For that, he said he will take a systems advance to solving their design challenges. "This will probably include both acquisitions and internal growth."



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Indeed an acquisition took place: The Virtual Garage software suite from Freescale Semiconductor Inc. to fortify Mentor's positioning in automotive.



During a discussion with EDA DesignLine, O'Brien was talking in the name of Mentor, he declared: "The prospect embraced by Mentor includes areas such as embedded software management, data network design, electrical systems integration and complexity optimization. Development in these domains is motivated by customer demand for latest, often elective, electronic features that raise the number of signals flowing about the vehicle and the number of manufactured vehicle configurations."

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O'Brien stated the trend is expected to persist since hybrid and electric vehicles obviously have higher electrical and electronic substance than usual equivalents.



He stated: "A lot of large products, like aircraft and battleships, can be thought of as huge assemblies of integrated electronic systems. Even though it's very difficult to build complete virtual representations of such composite assemblies, Mentor is currently showing that established EDA techniques such as model driven development are certainly valid."

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This trend towards automotive EDA is not just true to Mentor. From the start of the year, Synopsys Inc. has too undertaken major initiatives.



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First on the listing is on the acquirement of Vast Technology to extend its virtual prototyping solutions into the automotive and customer space.



Shortly after, Synopsys announced the acquirement of CoWare Inc. to develop its portfolio of system-level design and verification products used in wireless, customer and automotive design.

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