When I consulted for the start-up company Physware on their new 3d Field Solver 5 years ago it dawned on me – IC designers really need the accuracy of 3D Field Solvers to create their frequency-dependent s-parameters for circuit simulation.
Mentor finally acknowledged the same conclusion as Carey Robertson just wrote about this today.
It appears that Mentor is writing their own 3D field solver instead of just buying one of the many niche tools already on the market.
What I learned from Physware was that the 3D Field Solver market is dominated by companies that have superstar developers with Ph.D. degrees and have been published in technical journals.
All the best to Mentor in their 3D field solver journey.
Hi Daniel,
I seriously doubt Mentor developed a 3D Solver internally, too much work and innovation required.
My guess is that they will buy one and call it their own. Silicon Frontline is probably too big for Mentor but maybe Pextra. PexRC is faster anyway.
Just my opinion of course, but since Carey is writing about it an announcement is probably imminent.
D.A.N.
Daniel,
Good points, however the Calibre produce line has generated a lot of revenue for Mentor to invest in creating a new 3D Field Solver from scratch.
Let’s see what they announce on this one with the formal product introduction.
Daniel
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So today we read that Mentor has purchased some assets from Zeland Software Inc however the entire article focus is PCB.
So, what about using the 3d field solver technology for IC and package designers?
The article link: http://finance.yahoo.com/news/Mentor-Graphics-Enhances-bw-2704286854.html?x=0&.v=1
Daniel Nenni was right, Mentor acquired 3D field solver startup Pextra, http://danielnenni.com/2010/03/28/mentor-graphics-acquires-3d-field-solver-pextra/ instead of writing their own from scratch.
If you try to visit http://www.pextracorp.com it redirects to http://www.mentor.com, so that may be the only press announcement about this deal that we read.
Let’s see how fast it takes the marketing department to rename this product with the word “calibre” in it.
Mentor certainly has the sales channel to deliver this new capability into their installed base.
So the 3D field solver will produce a very accurate netlist for simulation, so the bottleneck remains the long run times to use time-based SPICE circuit simulators on these netlists. Sounds like an opportunity to me to sell faster and higher capacity SPICE tools.
There is also an official announcement: SEC filing by Mentor on 3/17/10:
http://www.faqs.org/sec-filings/100317/MENTOR-GRAPHICS-CORP_10-K/dex21.htm
In this filing, Pextra is listed as a Mentor subsidiary.
Daniel,
Good eye on the SEC form, but then again you had your inside sources months ago…
It’s an odd trend in EDA that larger companies are buying smaller companies and not issuing any press release at all (i.e. Synopsys buys Gemini DA, Mentor buys Pextra). One reason would be to remain stealthy, another to hide the price, …
All the best to Mentor in adding 3D field solvers to the IC design flow. It’s time has come.