Mentor puts its money where its DFT mouth is
Both companies, when contacted, were reluctant to provide any more details until the deal is done, however Stephen Pateras of LogicVision did say,
“We feel the merger makes sense for both LV employees and LV’s customers. For the most part our products are complimentary to Mentor’s DFT products.”
I guess I’d have to agree with Steve. As far as being beneficial to LogicVision employees, it seems like a win for them. Mentor’s stock, for the last couple of months, has finally started recovering from its downhill tumble that started around the time of Cadence’s failed takeover bid in June of last year. LogicVision stock, on the other hand, has been pretty consistently hovering around $1/share since Virage’s failed takeover bid for them, in December. So LV stockholders can hitch a ride on Mentor’s ascent… takeover targets make good bedfellows? 
There’s not a whole lot of overlap between the DFT products of the two companies – well, they both market MBIST, LBIST tools, and boundary scan tools – but in my opinion, LV brings more experience to the table here. Mentor has always been thought of as a 1st-tier DFT provider, but its BIST and BSD tools have taken a back seat to its scan and compression tool, TestKompress, with which they continue to improve the amount of compression possible, and use it as the feedback link in their strong DFM offerings. LogicVision also brings mixed-signal BIST tools to the table (ETSerDes and ETPLL), as well as a more mature IEEE 1149.6 BSD tool.
There’s also a case for existing synergy as well, since LogicVision has been marketing ScanBurst, an at-speed clocking infrastructure that works with TestKompress.
David Stannard of Cadence [formerly of Mentor - he actually taught me FastScan, many years ago!] provides a very thoughtful assessment of the deal in Daniel Payne’s blog post “Mentor Acquires LogicVision“, and concludes it this way:
“I feel that this is a win for Mentor, a win for the old LV customers, and increased pressure for Synopsys and Cadence. IMO, Mentor is #1, consolidates its ability to be #1 for existing customers and with the majority of the remaining market being held by Synopsys.”
So there you have it. If the deal goes through, it is planned to ba a “reverse triangular merger” (which I’m pretty sure Kobe Bryant can do on the b-ball court) where a piece of Mentor will be absorbed into LogicVision, which will then become a wholly owned piece of Mentor, which makes me think that we’ll still be seeing the LogicVision logo on products for some time to come – but that’s my own conjecture. Either way, I think Mentor has anchored itself as the major DFT player in the industry.
Stumble It!
Gotta say this one took me by surprise. Not that it doesn’t make sense, it’s just that I had totally written off LV as a lost cause and just wasn’t paying attention. It makes more sense than Cadence/Magma considering how small and lethargic the test market has become. Not sure it can support more than one real BIST player.
Sounds like a good union of two good EDA vendors.
Although, maybe ARM would have been a better fit
since they provide serdes PHY IP and excellent characterization
of high-speed serdes would have been more important
to their customers than to users of EDA tools.
Lou:
Thanks for reading and commenting! I will be interesting to see what form this all takes, since Mentor and LogicVision alike are mum on details. Stay tuned!
David:
That’s a good point – although I’d like to see the SerDes BIST on more than ARM SerDes – it’s more accurate than most of the BIST implementations that the IP vendors normally use. Also, from what I gather, LV’s SerDes BIST is more usually sold to the users, not the IP vendors, since most of the test IP resides outside critical custom circuitry (i.e. in the placed and routed user logic). Actually, we discussed this somewhat in a recent post: http://www.dftdigest.com/blog-posts/testability-of-high-speed-serdes/
Thanks for reading and commenting!
I wonder if Synopsys was ever a factor, there would have been even less overlap. So will MBISTA be slowly phased out? I still do see it around a fair bit, and for many designs, it’s perfectly fine.
Would be interesting to get a comment from Synopsys. Were they outbid by Mentor, or did the fact that LogicVision never had a profitable year turn them off to the BIST market. Maybe they wanted to maintain profitability at the risk of finally losing the dominant test market share position
Not sure what Steve means by product being “complimentary”. Most of the key products do overlap. Wonder if MENT will merge or kill off some Logicvision products.
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