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I have been very excited by Mentor's acquisition of Flomerics because it represents the first time that a traditional EDA vendors has acknowledged and acted upon the fact that a system is more than just the electronic components. The problem with ESL, as I had stated in numerous venues for many years, is the "E", since it is impossible to consider all of the architectural tradeoffs when you are constrained by the parochial approach that provides only tools to explore a portion of the system, namely the electronic part.
I do understand, of course, that The Mathworks, a traditional provider of system level solutions, has, in the last few years, extended its products portfolio to provide support for electronic system level design, but Mentor, a company that by the way was the first EDA vendor to collaborate with The Mathworks, is the first EDA company to enter a non-electronics market segment when it acquired Flomerics.
Had Mentor followed the traditional EDA industry convention, it would have purchased the company, retained what was directly related to its EDA market, and sold or otherwise disposed of the rest of the company. This it did not do: on the contrary!
Henry Potts, Vice President and General Manager of the Systems Design Division, explained the corporate strategy as follows: "As you know, the development of an electronic product requires much more than the design of the PCB. Yes, we will continue to enhance our PCB systems design flows but this is really not enough to keep up with advancing technology and our customers business needs. We will continue to make incremental improvements to the flows and every once in a while make a quantum jump in productivity or design cycle reduction as we did with Xtreme."
He went on to say: "But if we really want to significantly improve the development process we must do things that improve design efficiencies and often these will take us beyond pure PCB design and into areas like mechanical design or manufacturing. Flomerics is an example where their products are used in the Mechanical domain, some specifically for the analysis of electronic products, some for other industries but again in the mechanical domain. So primarily, we bought Flomerics to further our electronic product development capabilities but as a design automation supplier, we will not limit ourselves to just the design of electronics. We now have a sales force that in familiar with and into the mechanical domain. Our computational fluid dynamics core software has application beyond electronics cooling and we will continue to sell and support that into markets that go beyond PCB related. "
Dan Boncella, Director of Marketing for the division described the dynamics of the new organization by stressing the correlation between the two organizations. "The current Flomerics sales force has a strong if not dominate foothold in the mechanical domain as it relates to the analysis of electronic products, i.e. the PCB in the enclosure with conduction and convection cooling: enclosure, fans, heatsinks, other cooling mechanisms,... They understand this market and have the appropriate contacts to continue to sell and support the customer. We will continue to use this sales force and have them coordinate with the EDA force when appropriate, i.e., a common customer , etc. Flomerics also has had a very strong marketing group, small but very productive. We will "Mentorize" the web site and collaterals but continue to depend on the strong and knowledgeable marketing organization to position the products, deal with the MCAD press, present at conferences, and so on."
John Isaac, Director of Systems market Development, described Mentor's understanding of the fluid dynamics market by stating that: "The application areas for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is quite broad but all can leverage a strong core engine which Flomerics has. As a primary focus in the past, Flomerics has a number one position in the electronics cooling market and entry products in two other segments that all use the same powerful engine. Ansys has a small presence in the electronics cooling market but a major one in the more general CFD market. In total, the CFD market is estimated to be about $450M."
I was curious to understand if the Systems Design Division saw any parallels in the way designs are created and implemented in the fluid dynamics design flow and some applications in the EDA flow. Henry Potts pointed out that: "Absolute parallels and as you can imagine, the building of the model can make or break both the accuracy and speed of the analysis. This is one of the strengths of the Flomerics CFD engine. They have some very intelligent algorithm developers (Phds) in Germany and Russia that have developed unique ways to break a physical entity (like a PCB in an enclosure or the inside of a water pump,...) into structures that represent it accurately yet won't require a Cray to perform the analysis. Today they dominate the electronics cooling market but as they expand into more general CFD markets in the Mechanical domain, this engine is proving to be a definite differentiator."
What Mentor is showing is that EDA companies are not condemned to remain in their traditional markets. BY looking at the appropriate opportunity, an EDA vendor can open new market opportunities, widen the revenue sources, an improve the opportunities of a more stable corporate growth.
You can read more about Mentor and Flomerics here
Mentor completes acquisition of Flomerics
Two good British deals, and the advent of Mentorence
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