Synopsys Acquires Coverity

Synopsys announced this afternoon that they are acquiring Coverity for $375M subject to all the usual reviews.

There are a couple of other big EDA connections. Aki Fujimora, who was CTO of Cadence, is on the board. And Adreas Kuehlmann is the VP of R&D. He used to run Cadence Berkeley Laboratories before moving to the other end of the bay bridge. Before I moved to the Mission District in San Francisco, the building I backed onto was Berry Street and Coverity are based in offices just across the street. I interviewed him for DAC.com. He was the president of CEDA despite no longer being really in EDA, but as a software guy I’m interested in software devleopment methodology. I think it must be the shortest distance I have ever had to go for an interview.

Although I’m sure Coverity sells software to groups developing software to run on large SoCs, their market is not so restricted and they serve the general software development market. The heart of their technology is a static analysis engine for software called SAVE (static analysis verification engine). Their main products do a full static analysis of large code-bases and finds quality and security defects, including full interprocedural analysis, not just one source file at a time. Another product finds holes in test and prioritizes how to fix them.

This is an interesting acquisition since it isn’t really firmly in the EDA space. Of course, Mentor has had product in the software space for a long time, but focused on embedded and software for SoCs, so not so far from their mainline business.

Or as the press release puts it:Software complexity and the resulting quality and security issues are dramatically increasing. Today, more than six million professional software developers across the world write more than 60 million lines of code every day, deployed to fulfill mission-critical, safety-critical and security-critical tasks. Many of those deployments are fragile or even failing, resulting in delayed or lost revenue, recalled products, loss of customer trust, and even safety issues. Since spinning out of a Stanford research project 10 years ago, Coverity has been developing revolutionary technology to find and fix defects in software code before it is released, improving software security. Bringing together the Synopsys and Coverity teams opens up opportunities to increase penetration into the semiconductor and systems space where Synopsys excels. The acquisition also enables Synopsys to enter a new, growing market geared toward enterprise IT and independent software providers that Synopsys doesn’t currently address.

Synopsys press release is here.

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