Mentor Graphics Corporation Has acquired Valor Computerized Systems, Ltd. for net consideration valued at about $50 million. Mentor paid approximately 5.6 million shares of Mentor stock, valued at a little over $46 million at the close of yesterday's trading, and $32.5 million in cash. The total consideration paid to Valor is thus just under $80 million. Immediately prior to closing, Valor had cash of approximately $29 million. Valor's revenues for its last reported full year ending December 31, 2008 were approximately $40 million. So the price paid is twice the 2008 revenue number. Of course the fact that Valor had $29 million in cash further diminishes the value of the consideration to $50 million or roughly the 2008 revenues of the acquired company.

Mentor Graphics Corp. and STMicroelectronics announced a broad-scoped collaboration to develop advanced design solutions at the 32-nm technology node and down to 20-nm node.

The three-year joint-development project, named DeCADE, seeks to build on advanced design solutions for SoC (System On Chip) development for Digital and Analog design, including system-level approaches, design methodologies, place and route strategies, optical correction for advanced manufacturing, modeling, electrical characterization and parasitic extraction. ST will significantly contribute to the development of these new SoC design tools, which will give ST a head start in its ability to deliver customer-focused semiconductor chips and platforms.

SpringSoft, Inc. introduced two new products aimed at addressing the increasing challenge of designing custom chips that contain both analog and digital circuitry. The company unveiled its Laker Custom Row Placer and Laker Custom Digital Router. The tools are fully compatible with the Laker Custom Layout Automation System, allowing designers to work within a single custom IC layout environment to efficiently place-and-route both digital custom cells and standard cells for either mixed-signal or custom digital designs.

Yvonne Ryan spent over 25 years developing her understanding of what constitutes good leadership (and how best to apply it in a technical environment) while working in a variety of positions from engineering team leader to Director of Engineering and acting Vice-President of Engineering, with stints along the way as Program Manager, Project Manager, and consultant. In the middle of 2003 she founded Leader's Edge CA a consulting company dedicated to helping technical professionals advance their careers and become effective leaders within their organizations.

Tensilica, Inc. has announced the immediate availability of its third generation of this family of products. The five upward-compatible processor cores are based on the company's common Xtensa architecture and provide the price/performance/low-power required for a wide range of embedded control functions in today's compute-intensive dataplane functions. Improvements in this third generation of Diamond Standard controllers deliver up to 15 percent faster clock speed, up to 20 percent smaller die area and up to 15 percent less power consumption Tensilica stated.

Evatronix SA, announced a series of free technical seminars on two of the most popular IP technologies – 8051 and USB – taking place in China and Taiwan – Beijing (March 25) and Hsinchu (March 30), respectively.

"We are excited about this opportunity to share the 13 years of our IP design and integration experience with every engineer involved in the SoC development process," said Michal Jedrak, Technical Marketing Manager at Evatronix. "Our seminars offer an excellent chance to discuss the hottest ASIC and FPGA design topics and get immediate answers to key questions."

Magma Design Automation Inc. announced the availability of FineSim Fast Monte Carlo, a technology the company labels a revolutionary new alternative to traditional Monte Carlo analysis. Most engineers rely heavily on statistical methods such as traditional Monte Carlo analysis for design reliability, an approach that has limitations making accurate analysis almost impossible. FineSim Fast Monte Carlo uses proprietary dynamic error-controlled algorithms along with statistical techniques to provide dramatic improvement in speed and accuracy compared to traditional Monte Carlo statistical analysis. It has shown as much as 100 times better runtime when compared to other commercial methods, with superior accuracy.

Magma Design Automation Inc. unveiled Tekton, a new static timing analysis (STA) platform that offers significantly higher capacity and dramatically faster runtimes than traditional STA tools, without sacrificing accuracy. Unlike other solutions, Tekton runs multi-scenario analysis on low-cost hardware without requiring a large number of expensive servers and software licenses. Leveraging breakthrough technology, this revolutionary new platform addresses complex sign-off challenges and is suited for today's most challenging designs. Its next generation architecture offers the speed, capacity, and accuracy required for the industry's toughest designs. According to Rajeev Madhavan, Chairman and CEO, who announced the new product during the Magma Users Group meeting in San Jose, the new product has been engineered from scratch to meet the challenges of execution speed and accuracy presented by today's designs.

GateRocket Inc. has significantly bolstered its technical, marketing, and sales acumen with the addition of two savvy and experienced chip design industry veterans. Jim Hogan, well-known EDA entrepreneur, investor, and executive has joined the GateRocket Advisory board; and Jim Wagner, with extensive EDA sales experience, has been named GateRocket Director of Sales.

Carbon Design Systems announced the availability of virtual models for ARM Mali Graphic Processor Units (GPUs). These new models, including the Mali-200 and Mali-400MP, are compiled directly from the ARM register transfer level (RTL) code and are 100% implementation accurate.