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Is this an active rumor or is ANSYS really acquiring Mentor Graphics?
Apache used to be a preferred vendor for us but after the ANSYS acquisition they seemed to have lost their zest for life. Honestly I have not heard much from them in the FinFET world. ANSYS has a 2x market cap over MENT? Do they have the cash to make an outright buy or would it be a stock deal? Time to buy some MENT? There doesn't seem to be a lot of product overlap so maybe it is a good rumor to start. Comments from the experts on the finance and technology side please? Is it time to give Carl Icahn a call?
Let's call it wishful thinking....... I do think it would be good for EDA as I mentioned previously:
The dark horse here of course is ANSYS if they acquire Mentor for example. That would certainly shake things up a bit. Not only would that take Mentor into a whole new level of exposure outside traditional EDA, it would get ANSYS securely inside the semiconductor ecosystem and give Synopsys and Cadence cause for concern, absolutely.
Mentor stock got hammered when they offered lower guidance a while back. The recent down stock market has not helped that much. They closed on Friday at $17.8. I'm sure an acquisition would give them a nice bounce. But then you have the whole question of merging what is still an East Coast company with an Oregon company. I'm sure Apache had some major culture shock once ANSYS started playing a larger role.
ANSYS calls on a lot of the same companies as Mentor with their HFSS and Apache offerings. So there could be some synergy here. There are is also strong market adjacency to EDA with their all physics design and modeling software.
Mentor has several overlapping expertise with ANSYS in mechanical, CFD, and system level automation, and it's a pioneer in Physical Verification, its forte. So, while there is complementary technology from ANSYS at areas adjacent to EDA, there are many areas overlapping too. So, keeping business consolidation apart, I do not see a great value-add, of course keeping EDA as the prime technology area. In my view, it would have been better if Mentor would have acquired missing parts either from ANSYS or elsewhere to strengthen its mechanical CAD and system automation offering.
There are less overlaps, just mutiple CFD tools(it seems like Synopys have multiple spice tools).
For Electrical thermal, there are Mentor's FlothermXT and Flotherm, Ansys's Icepak. Due to there is less Icepak users and Icepak is build up on the Fluent general CFD , so the new company could be focus on FlothermXT platform and let Icepak into EOL.
FloMaster and FloEFD( Mentor's 2d/3D front CFD tools) are very complementary to Ansys's Fluent and CFX solution.
