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The Smart Techie was renamed Siliconindia India Edition starting Feb 2012 to continue the nearly two decade track record of excellence of our US edition.

Emulation is going to make a comeback!

ST Team
Thursday, October 6, 2011
ST Team
After a period of slump, the EDA industry is back to its feet. The Semiconductor industry itself has witnessed quite a change, thanks to the shift in focus post recession. During a recent visit to India, Dr. Walden C Rhines, Chairman & CEO, Mentor Graphics. & Hanns Windele, Vice President – Europe & India, Mentor Graphics talked to SmartTechie in an exclusive interview about the changing industry, the new trends and what EDA players need to look out for in coming days.

How has the market been for EDA industry, especially Mentor Graphics?

At Mentor Graphics, we had a fantastic year in 2010, and this year looks equally terrific although there has been some weakness in the second quarter due to the shortage of parts caused by the Japanese earth quake. Most people are forecasting that the longing will be made up during the year but some manufacturers are getting a little skeptical that the second half for it not being as strong as they thought. Overall the earning in general has been good. Recently several companies including Apple have announced outstanding results. We may not have a strong second half as some are hoping, yet it seems to have a reasonable single digit growth year. We recently announced our first quarter results and over all the Electronic Design Automation (EDA) space has done exceptionally well with over 16 percent growth. The semiconductor industry is expecting more than 10 percent growth in the EDA sector this year. I am expecting the first half of the next year to be similar, but the second half will have the effects of the large capital investments that happened last year. Also this year and we will probably see some price pressure. In general this is a relative good period for the semiconductor industry.

What are the trends that are driving the EDA industry today?

We are now in a big process transition — working on 20 nanometers chips. The EDA industry and the semiconductor industry are working closely together to solve a significant technology challenge — to get processes, technology and design in place for 20 nanometers. At the same time 28 nanometer technology, is now in place and has production capacity. So there are lots of growth in the next generation of design, software, tools, and infrastructure support. At the same time EDA is expanding for embedded software used to be a relative small part of chip design and now has grown in importance. Although none of the other major companies in EDA are in embedded software, for Mentor Graphics embedded software is one of our fastest growing businesses.


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