Mentor Buys Oasys Assets For Digital Implementation

Bolstering its bid in the digital implementation flow as well as positioning itself squarely against EDA leaders Cadence and Synopsys in the RTL synthesis arena, Mentor Graphics this afternoon announced it has acquired ‘certain assets’ of Oasys Design Systems for its RealTime RTL physical synthesis technology.

This acquisition aligns with Mentor’s goal to deliver a best-in-class digital implementation platform to address the performance, power and area (PPA) challenges at advanced nodes. According to Pravin Madhani, general manager of the Place & Route Division at Mentor Graphics, all IP, technology, software and people have been acquired. While not disclosing the exact number of people joining Mentor, he said it is, “a strong team.”

Oasys is privately held and was founded in 2004 by RTL synthesis experts with decades of experience among them, namely, Paul van Besouw, Johnson Limqueco, and Harm Arts.

The key in the deal is system-level play, which has been largely absent from mainstream EDA toolflows. The Oasys technology is meant to allow synthesis of the entire top level of the largest designs, at the same time being physically aware to correlate better with physical design.

According to a news release from Mentor, the “placement first” synthesis methodology and integrated RTL floorplanning capability allow physical backend issues to be analyzed and addressed at RTL stages before hand-off to the back-end groups for physical design implementation.

In the move to 20 and 16nm as well as the need to synthesize high performance cores, design engineers are looking for both high capacity and performance in a certain class of designs, Madhani explained. To this end, he said, Oasys has claimed to have large capacity and Mentor’s Olympus platform has proven it. “Together, they create a very interesting solution for customers…with the capacity giving the edge,” especially when a graphics core, for instance, can be 10 million gates.

Mentor said the acquisition will allow it to deliver an RTL-to-GDSII digital implementation platform for the first time.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.