EDA's 'quiet company'

EDA's 'quiet company'
If Northwestern Mutual is the "quiet company" of the insurance world, so Monterey Design Systems must be the quiet company of EDA. So quiet, in fact, that people are starting to ask what happened to Monterey.

Since both Monterey and Magma Design Automation started around the same time, and both generated massive venture capital investments to build next-generation IC physical-design solutions, the two are often compared.

Magma today is far more visible than Monterey. Magma is a public company, generates a fair amount of news, has a considerable presence at conferences and, by most objective measures, appears to be well ahead of Monterey.

Magma has raised more money and has more employees. In the first quarter of 2001, Magma had $16.2 million in revenue, a 220 percent year-to-year increase, along with net income of $1 million. Recently, Magma claimed more than 100 tapeouts.

Monterey, meanwhile, claimed a 230 percent year-to-year revenue gain in the first quarter of 2002, but won't reveal the actual numbers. Monterey is not yet profitable, claims just over 30 tapeouts-and there's no IPO in sight.

Moreover, Magma has register-transfer-level synthesis and Monterey does not. So Monterey is not providing an RTL-to-GDSII "IC implementation" solution as defined by Dataquest.

But Jacques Benkoski, Monterey's president and CEO, says that "things are going really well" for the company, and cites a couple of major breakthroughs to prove it. First, he said, the Dolphin 2.0 release of late last year took the company out of "hand-holding" mode with customers. Second, Monterey's pay-upon-tapeout licensing model is finally starting to pay off, although it's clearly cut into the company's short-term cash flow.

Monterey has 140 employees with "close to zero" turnover, Benkoski said, and it recently raised another $20 million, bringing the total to $90 million. The company has plenty of cash and does not need to go public right now, he said.

Benkoski said that Monterey is focusing its efforts on R&D and is solving a "bigger problem" than Magma and other competitors. "We're going after the holy grail: how to design a 20 million-gate system-on-chip, with design closure, IR drop and signal integrity," he said.

Monterey seems to be adopting a tortoise-and-hare approach compared with its more flamboyant competitor, Magma. It remains to be seen whether the "quiet company" will win the race and join the front ranks of the EDA industry.