OK – you gotta think a little harder than that…
John Cooley in his post on DeepChip – entitled, “What Mentor-LogicVision merger means for digital scan test“, perfectly illustrates the typical viewpoint of the general population of EDA watchers. As if “digital scan test” came even close to describing what the deal was about.
His first statement, “There’s massive overlap between the LogicVision and Mentor product lines….”. Gabe Moretti, on his blog Gabe on EDA, in his blog post on the subject, seemed to think the same: “On the surface it looks like there is significant overlap between the products…“.
To Moretti’s credit, at least he tried to dig deeper into a real comparison of the product lines, however unclear he seems to be on the concepts. Cooley, on the other hand, appears to have visited the company websites, and scanned through the product list: “memory test – check… Logic BIST – check… compresion, check…”, and then counted the check-marks.
But it’s not my objective to pick on these guys.
Seriously folks, the existence of a tool does not imply a strength, and using somewhat the same name for a tool does not make an overlap. I’d be pointing out the obvious to say that the analysis went a bit deeper as the deal was considered. I don’t deny there is overlap. The companies do sell similar tools. But maybe it’s easier to compare their strengths:
For sure, the flagship product of Mentor’s IC Test offerings is TestKompress - compression IP generation and ATPG (TK works just like FastScan if you turn off the compression part of it). Combine that with YieldAssist to provide the feedback path to the Calibre physical database, and you have the the pieces around which Mentor has put a significant amount of effort: yield analysis and volume diagnostics.
LogicVision, on the other hand, is focused squarely on BIST: memory BIST, Logic BIST, mixed-signal BIST. Even its so-called compression tool is a variation on its logic BIST. ScanBurst is an attempt to meet die-hard ATPG users half-way and offer some of the advantages of the logic BIST infrastructure. BIST, BIST, BIST…
LogicVision’s yield analysis tool (Yield Insight) exploits failure data from their BIST tools. Mentor’s yield data comes from ATPG failures. Mentor, with yield data from both logic and memory will now have a complete solution for volume diagnostics, right? And, the whole picture is available whether you choose to do deterministic scan, logic BIST, or both. To my knowledge, Mentor does not have linkage between its BIST tools (memory or logic) and the physical database for this purpose. I believe that this is really what Mentor wanted.
Both companies offer boundary scan tools, but like all companies that do, these tools are minor products, more or less, that serve mostly to generate IP for various test access to their BIST implementations – the boundary scan part of it is standards driven, so there’s no real secret sauce there.
I blogged the announcement when it happened a couple weeks ago, and received 2 comments wondering why Synopsys hadn’t been the one to pick it up, still citing the overlap, and one even wondering if Synopsys had been outbid by Mentor. I don’t know – I have no special insight or inside knowledge. Maybe the commenter is right, I should see what thought, if any, Synopsys has on the situation – maybe when the deal goes through, I’ll see if I can get a comment. But it seems like Synopsys was busy picking up analog IP…
Stumble It!
Great post, John! It takes domain insight to recognize which products are a company’s strengths and which are me-too. Clearly your expertise enables you to add value over the mainstream (EDA) media.
So John, you have more expertise and a better perspective than most on this topic, please go ahead and decode the deal. I would be interested in your take. What was the most significant to me was the LogicVision was already public and decided to be acquired.
Ok – but don’t think too hard …
… at a very simplistic level stating that there is product ‘overlap’ means that Mentor will need to make a lot of product and personnel decisions and that none have been announced. It’s a little harsh to call people “clueless” that point that out. And, LogicVision had started to focus and began ready to make a lot of noise on ATPG. What the business will look like, not just technology comparisons, is the hardest part to think about.
Sorry for the delayed responses these days. Really snowed in at work – but thanks for reading and commenting!
It’s interesting to me that both Sean and “Other” are both more concerned with the business aspects of the deal – which is perfectly valid curiosity, but pretty much outside my area of expertise… I am a DFT guy, after all, and so would have less to offer in the way of predictions of how the business will look, than the particular product mix that Mentor/LogicVision seems to now have in their collective hands.
Mr. Test Guy, I didn’t actually use the word “clueless”, so the quotes are inappropriate, although it’s fair enough to paraphrase my assertions that way – but I don’t think it’s harsh at all to point out that when more mainstream EDA pundits write anything about test or DFT, they gloss things over in the worst way. It’s pretty much systemic.
As to the overlap, yes, a simplistic view yields the result of *lots of overlap*, because they *both have tools*. But even in the case of Cadence’s failed TO of Mentor – people were drawing enough shades of gray to come to reasonable conclusions as to whether one tool or another would survive (http://blog.shrinkingviolence.com/2008/06/overlaps-r-us.html).
I probably won’t be able to “decode the deal”, but I gave it a shot from the tool perspective. I don’t know much about the finances other than the fact that LGVN was probably spending, as a percentage, more than they wanted on support functions (G&A, sales, distr.) and fed by too few customers (a couple big ones). Mentor’s resources were irresistible… guessing?
cheers,
JMF
[...] be fair, none of them know much about the DFT market). I first blogged the news here, and again here, in response to the overlap arguments. My feeling was that LogicVision brought strengths in some [...]