Mentor Graphics Corporation, a Siemens business, is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services, and award-winning support for the world’s most successful electronic, semiconductor, and systems companies. We enable companies to develop better electronic products faster and more cost-effectively. Our innovative products and solutions help engineers conquer design challenges in the increasingly complex worlds of board and chip design. Mentor has the broadest industry portfolio of best-in-class products and is the only EDA company with an embedded software solution. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777.
Design to Silicon
Traditional EDA tools for physical design and verification have reached limits due to greater manufacturing process variability and the growing size and complexity of designs that take advantage of the latest nanometer scaling. With the advent of new process technologies, the handoff between integrated circuit (IC) layout and manufacturing has changed from a simple check to a multi-step process where the layout design must be enhanced to ensure efficient manufacturing. This presents a host of challenges related to manufacturing process effects, photolithography, data volumes, and achieving a cost-effective yield of finished chips from each wafer.
To meet these challenges with confidence, design teams turn to Mentor’s Olympus-SoC™ place and route system with Multi-Corner-Multi-Mode timing analysis and DFM-aware layout optimization for rapid closure of physical designs. The Olympus-SoC system works with the industry-leading integrated Calibre® design-to-silicon platform, which includes physical verification, full-chip, transistor-level parasitic extraction, model-based design for manufacturability (DFM) solutions, mask data preparation (MDP) and resolution enhancement technologies (RET), such as optical proximity correction and other computational lithography techniques. The Calibre product family efficiently and accurately manages every facet of the design-to-silicon transition.
The Mentor Tessent™ product suite is a comprehensive silicon test and yield analysis platform that addresses the challenges of manufacturing test, debug, and yield ramp for today’s SoCs. Built on the foundation of the best-in-class solutions for each test discipline, Tessent brings them together in a powerful test flow that ensures total chip coverage.
Tanner EDA by Mentor is an integrated, affordable and intuitive product suite for the design, layout and verification of analog/mixed signal (AMS) and Micro-Electro-Mechanical Systems (MEMS) ICs. Used by more than 25,000 designers around the world, Tanner tools support an end-to-end flow: top-down, mixed-signal design capture and simulation; synthesis with DFT support; physical design; place-and-route; and “sign-off ready” timing analysis to tape-out.
Functional Verification
Mentor provides its customers with critical tools for solving the increasingly complicated problems of verifying that today’s complex chip designs actually function as intended. Functional errors at the system level are the leading cause of design revisions affecting time to market and profitability. Design teams must improve existing methodologies with tools that scale across design complexity and multiple levels of abstraction.
Mentor is transforming verification with new use models and a collection of best-in-class technologies and methodologies. From block-level simulation to full system-level design emulation, the Mentor Enterprise Verification Platform™ (EVP) boosts productivity in ASIC and SoC functional verification by combining advanced verification technologies in a comprehensive platform.
The Mentor EVP combines Questa® Verification Platform, the Veloce® Emulation Platform, and the Questa® Visualizer Debug into a high-performance, datacenter resource. Mentor EVP features global resource management that supports project teams around the world, maximizing both user productivity and total verification return on investment.
The Veloce Emulation Platform uses innovative software, running on powerful, qualified hardware and an extensible operating system, to target design risks faster than hardware-centric strategies. Now considered among the most versatile and powerful of verification tools, project teams use emulation for hardware debugging, hardware/software co-verification or integration, system-level prototyping, low-power verification and power estimation and performance characterization.
The Questa Verification Platform is the most comprehensive EDA solution for functional verification, merging standards support, tools and a “design for verification” methodology to minimize verification cycles and design revisions. This solution provides the most complete path to verification closure, including integrated technologies and methodologies such as advanced TLM and UVM testbenches, assertions, formal, and verification IP.
Integrated PCB-FPGA Systems Design
As ICs, ASICs (application-specific integrated circuits) and FPGAs (field-programmable gate arrays) become more complex and printed circuit board (PCB) fabrication technology advances to include embedded components and high-density interconnect layers, the design of PCBs is reaching new levels of complexity. These are frequently a source of design bottlenecks.
Mentor is the market and technology leader in PCB design, providing many of the world’s largest system design companies today with a range of scalable design solutions to reduce the time, cost and risk of electronic system design: Xpedition™ Enterprise, for the creation of today’s most complex PCB designs; Board Station® XE, the market standard solution for the PCB design challenges of the global enterprise; and the PADS® flow, the leading Windows-based solution for complex PCB design.
Mentor also offers solutions for specific design challenges such as radio frequency (RF) design management, and verification advanced packaging, concurrent team design, FPGA-on-board integration and design data management.
Electronic Systems Level Design (ESL)
Design complexity of next-generation digital applications is outgrowing the capabilities of current design methods. Increasingly, designs are large systems that include embedded cores, IP, and complex signal processing hardware that implements computationally intensive algorithms.
To deal with this complexity, Mentor offers the EDA industry’s most comprehensive suite of electronic system level (ESL) design tools for hardware creation. Vista™, a SystemC debug environment, helps designers model their designs at a higher level of abstraction where they can identify and resolve problems with minimal effort.
For system integration, Visual Elite™ helps designers deal with IP from different sources, modeled in different languages, and written at different levels of abstraction. Together these tools deliver dramatic productivity and design quality improvements, and provide a methodology that will satisfy designers’ requirements for the next 10-15 years.
RTL Synthesis
Traditional hardware design methods that require manual RTL development and debugging are too time-consuming and error-prone for today’s complex designs. Mentor Catapult® and PowerPro® products automate creation of fully-verified, power-optimized RTL for downstream synthesis and physical design. With the Catapult High-Level Synthesis Platform, designers use industry-standard ANSI C++ and SystemC to describe functional intent at a high level of abstraction and then generate production-quality RTL. The PowerPro RTL Low-Power Platform provides a complete solution to accurately measure RTL power consumption and then interactively explore and thoroughly optimize power expenditure during the RTL development cycle.
Automotive EE Design Solutions
A new car now contains 15 percent more electronics than the models of one year ago, in entertainment, navigation and safety systems. As the electrical wiring systems in the transportation industry become increasingly complex, so the need for software solutions to manage this complexity grows.
Mentor offers an unrivalled range of leading-edge solutions being used by OEMs and wire harness manufacturers throughout the world. Mentor’s Capital tool is a powerful design environment developed specifically for the wire harness industry, providing a data-centric tool suite for electrical systems and associated harness design. Mentor’s Volcano™ product line supports a structured engineering process for the development of distributed control systems.
In-vehicle software with optimized resource utilization and network tools allow the design of robust AUTOSAR and non-AUTOSAR in-vehicle networks in a very cost – efficient way.
Embedded Software
The Mentor Embedded Software Division enables embedded development for a variety of applications including automotive, industrial, smart energy, medical devices, and consumer electronics. Embedded developers can create systems with the latest processors and micro-controllers with commercially supported and customizable Linux®-based solutions including the industry -leading Sourcery™ CodeBench and Mentor Embedded Linux products. For real-time control systems, developers can take advantage of the small-foot-print and low-power-capable Nucleus® RTOS.
Mechanical Analysis Division
The Mentor Mechanical Analysis Division delivers industry-leading computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation tools. These products help engineers quickly solve complex everyday engineering problems within tight budget and time constraints in these critical areas:
Electronics Cooling
Mentor leads the industry in electronics thermal analysis simulation software, with the largest installed base of any provider.* These electronics cooling simulation tools — FloTHERM®, FloTHERM® PCB and FloEFD™ — predict airflow, temperature and heat transfer in components, boards and complete systems.
Engineering Fluid Dynamics
FloEFD™ engineering fluid dynamics (EFD) software provides robust fluid flow and heat transfer simulation tools for more than 30 industries. Embedded in leading mechanical computer-aided design (MCAD) software, it helps engineers integrate analysis into cycles without disrupting the engineering process.
Built Environment & HVAC
FloVENT® pioneered the simulation of airflow as well as temperature distribution in and around buildings, aircraft, trains and automobiles, and is well-suited for specialist applications such as clean room contamination control and warehouse or datacenter temperature control. FloEFD can also be used for the analysis and optimization of HVAC equipment.
Thermal Characterization and Testing Solutions
T3Ster® and TeraLED® software and hardware-based solutions to perform thermal testing for semiconductor device packages, including ICs, power LEDs and other discrete components, stacked dies, MCMs and printed circuit boards. Power Tester 1500A, launched in 2014,is the only commercially available thermal testing product that combines both power cycling and thermal transient measurements with structure function analysis.
Fluid Systems Modeling
Flomaster has been the tool of choice for 1D thermo-fluid simulation of pipework networks and systems for more than 20 years. Based on Don Miller’s “Internal Flow Systems,” Flomaster is unrivalled in terms of accuracy, flexibility and cross-industry appeal due to its superior transient solver.
Consulting Service
Our Mechanical Analysis Consulting Services provide thermal and airflow services as well as thermal characterization of IC packages, power-LEDs, and other discrete components. We can help you optimize designs for thermal and fluid flow efficiencies, test and measure thermal characterization, and manage the entire project from concept to delivery.
Flynn Was Right: How a 2003 Warning Foretold Today’s Architectural Pivot