Although EDA vendor Mentor Graphics Corp has said its board-level design products will all be available for use on Windows NT by the end of the year, the company’s new marketing VP Anne Wagner says it will be a very long time if at all before NT displaces Unix as the industry’s chief chip design environment. She says although most EDA vendors are porting their EDA applications to NT, the market is not moving lock stock and barrel to NT, the business is additional to Unix design software orders. Wagner says that the state of the current semiconductor market has led chipmakers to press EDA vendors for software which will enable them to get products to market more quickly than they are currently able to, presenting significant new opportunities. With management and product transitions behind it, Wagner says Mentor is well-positioned to take advantage of this demand. Mentor rival Cadence Design Systems Inc software breaks at designs with more than 250,000 gates, Wagner claims.
