Mentor Graphics
More info
- Released
- 1981
- Type
- EDA software
- Owner
- Siemens (from 2017)
The third of the big EDA vendors, officially Siemens EDA these days but still called Mentor by everyone who uses it.
A group of Tektronix defectors founded the company in Oregon in 1981, selling turnkey electronic design workstations built on Apollo computers with their own software on top. The hardware fell away once workstations became commodities; the software stayed.
Mentor was strongest where circuits meet reality: board layout and physical verification with Calibre, which checks that a design can actually be manufactured. Alongside Synopsys and Cadence it made up EDA's big three. Siemens bought it in 2017 for about $4.5 billion, and in 2021 the name was retired.