Behind The Numbers
By Ed Sperling
It was all about profit loss and retrenchment last week for EDA’s Big Three.
Mentor Graphics expanded its displaced worker program to provide free training—read that as retooling—for out of work electronics designers and engineers. The company is offering classes in-person and online.
This is not only a good idea, it’s something more companies should be doing. Aside from the obvious goodwill benefits, where else can you get so many qualified engineers up to speed on your latest tools? Apple figured this out years ago by offering huge discounts on Macs in the K-12 grades. And just in case you’re out of work or know someone who is, click here.
Cadence Design Systems continued with business as usual—refreshing all of its major product lines—despite a hail of financial bullets flying around. The company posted a loss of $1.85 billion in fiscal 2008, almost all of it inherited by the new management team, including a loss on Mentor Graphics stock when Cadence tried to buy the company last summer and some restructuring charges. How many ways can you spell “ouch?”
At least some of that money ended up in the hands of rival Synopsys. The EDA market leader posted a 7.7% increase, year-over-year, for the quarter ended Jan. 31. Compared to Cadence’s huge loss, Synopsys had a profit of $52.4 million vs. $46.4 million the previous year. Don’t be surprised to see someone spinning donuts in Synopsys’ parking lot.
In the embedded processor world, ARM shipped its 10 billionth mobile processor. Just as a point of reference, this is the market that Intel is targeting with its new Atom processor. Needless to say, it has a lot of catching up to do–once it gets the power requirements down to something comparable.
In the FPGA world, there were positive signs emerging. Actel posted growth in Q4, up 1% from the previous quarter and 2% from the same quarter in 2007. Given the depressing news from many chip companies, this is good. Flat is the new up, and up is even better.
Over at Xilinx, the company rather quietly replaced former CEO and long-time chairman of the board Wim Roelandts with Philip Gianos, a venture capitalist. There must be some sort of trend underway in the industry that we’re not quite getting. Cadence’s new CEO, Lip-Bu Tan is a VC, too. Is it that hard for VCs to get a return on investment these days? Eight years ago you couldn’t drag these guys into corporate life. Now they’re popping up everywhere.
Tags: Actel, ARM, business, Cadence, Intel, Mentor Graphics, Synopsys, Xilinx