Monterey Merges with Aristo at the Party in Munich

Monterey Merges with Aristo at the Party in Munich
It's always a good idea to have big news to announce at conferences; the press is ready and waiting to latch onto real stories — not just 'invented' news manufactured to get a company's name in print. So it's 'real' news that several companies are announcing mergers at DATE in Munich, Germany this week. CynApps, Inc. has merged with Chronology Corp., to form Forte Design Systems. Monterey Design Systems, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) has merged with Aristo Technology, Inc. (Cupertino, CA). The fact that these mergers have been timed for announcement in Munich is not happenstance. The timing for the Monterey/Aristo merger is downright crucial.

A number of the big players in EDA have come out of late announcing a unified flow for chip design. For some observers, either Monterey made their move to be part of the trend, or they ran the risk of losing ground against the entrenched leaders in the industry. ISD Magazine had a chance to talk with the two CEOs involved in the merger — Jacques Benkoski (CEO) from Monterey and Simon Bloch (CEO) from Aristo. It was midnight in Munich, but after weeks of working to get the merger announcement prepared, they were definitely high on life.

Jacques said, "We've been so excited for days and we're going to give them [the entrenched leaders in EDA] a run for their money! [Monterey and Aristo] knew each other at a distance and then we started having joint customers. One of our customers suggested working on a joint flow, then other customers suggested a joint flow, and then we started talking. [We concluded:] Wouldn't it make sense to just merge? Now we can look to expand both our R&D and our sales efforts. We can offer customers full hierarchical design and implementation solutions."

The facts: Jacques will be CEO of the merged entity — an entity named Monterey. Simon will be Executive Vice President. "We'll both be working very hard to carry our message," Jacques says. "People [in both companies] sort of saw it coming. We were meeting at the marketing level to get [our joint] positioning correct and we were preparing to make joint customer calls. So, it's not big news within the company. The big question [should be]: What is the motivation for the merger? [Well], there is no over-lapping product. What Monterey didn't have, Aristo had, and vice versa. We get along very well on the personal level. Lots of talent that Monterey was looking to hire, we found at Aristo, and vice versa. We're looking to complete [Aristo's physical move into Monterey's offices] by the end of the month."

How does Jacques think the merger affects their competitive position with respect to Synopsys and Cadence?

"Let's start with Synopsys," Jacques says. "The important thing is that we're not really competing with Design Compiler; it's still part of the flow. We believe Synopsys continues to have a lot of knowledge from RTL to gates. There's no point in repeating that capability [that's been proven] on tens of thousands of designs. With respect to the expansion from Synopsys [however], into the physical design space, we expect to take them on. Synopsys is far from offering a unified flow and we sort of look at if from a different perspective. We will start with Design Compiler and continue with Dolphin."

Jacques offers, however that, "Cadence is a different story. They've got a very good market position with respect to Silicon Ensemble. We will continue to support Dolphin with Silicon Ensemble flow. However, with respect to IE [Integration Ensemble], we are offering something different. Our solution is available right now. You can see it. It's working. We're showing both Aristo and Dolphin and the top-level implementation. With IE, there's still a lot of work to go — the database is not [currently] compatible with Silicon Ensemble. We are way ahead."

Does Monterey think they can now anticipate a future where they become one of the Big Guys in EDA?

"We're continuing to do what we need to do. If as a result, Monterey may becomes one of the big players. [But], we really want to build a complete solution." Jacques is adamant. This is the real goal of the joint venture.

Simon agrees: "To accommodate the sizes [of the new designs] coming up, you needed to raise the level of abstraction. That's why we've been involved in modular block-based design. This is an emerging market that's going to grow rapidly in the coming year, with .13-µm manufacturing coming on board in the next several years. Our customers want complete satisfaction at both the hierarchical and gate-levels of abstraction. We've now got an extremely unique set of solutions, [which is the] only way to design large SOC devices."

What does Simon think Magma — another player in this space — will say?

"It's hard to predict what Magma will say about this. Some of Magma's customers have approached us to get our design capabilities on top of their gate level P&R. But, we've been focusing on the Silicon Ensemble design flow from Cadence, not so much for Magma. The same [situation] applies to Magma, Cadence, or Avanti — the need for hierarchical design capabilities as a necessary step in the flow. We'll continue working with those guys or offer the whole package [through Monterey/Aristo]. The methodologies are emerging for .13µm — some are based on existing tools and some are based on the new generation of tools."

Would Monterey and Aristo endorse a public benchmark to sort out current offerings?

"One of the things we noticed at Aristo is that it's hard to do benchmarking in this category of products [complex SOC designs], [because the results] depend not only on the product, but also on the methodology. One of the ways that we've been trying to address it at Aristo — and now at Monterey — we're going to engage with customers to help them put the design flow together, instead of benchmarking on non-practical alternatives. We have to work with real customers and we're seeing that, more and more, for customers, benchmarking is very expense for vendors and customers. We're seeing more at Aristo that customers would rather make decisions quicker and then focus on putting methodologies together quicker. They're going to judge tools according to the ability to do tape-outs. So, actually, we need to provide a methodology — not design service — component [with our product]. When you sell a product to a customer, you work closely with them to make sure that the tool can be used in the proper fashion. We actually already have customers working on a joint flow and hopefully by the end of the year, [we'll have multiple] customer tape-outs to report. [But tape-outs are always] a moving target."

Simon is not deterred by the current, sharp downturn in the semiconductor industry. "I personally think the stock of the public of EDA companies goes up when semiconductor industry is down."

Jacques agrees with respect to the downturn. "It's very sharp and that is what is surprising people. But the intrinsic worth of EDA remains. We're off to a great start and we're offering progress in quality and functionality."

On a personal note, Jacques is claiming that lack of sleep doesn't accumulate. He asserts that when you surpass 20 hours of lost sleep, the results are the same. To show solidarity with his new EVP, he handed the phone to Simon so he could confirm the metric. Instead, Simon asked; "Is that 20 hours per individual or combined across the team?" Monterey and Aristo's joint success hinges on an unambiguous message. Given that they can achieve that, it's probably a safe bet that industry observers should keep an eye on the new organization — once they've rested up from jet lag and this week's excitement.