Despite the challenging market, our products continued to gain market share. Calibre Interactive, our newest physical verification tool which was announced in June, won significantly against Cadence’s Assura product line. We intend to aggressively move into the cell-based physical verification space and offer customers upgrades to a fully integrated block- and cell-based physical verification environment. During the quarter, Applied Micro Circuits announced its standardization on Calibre for both block- and cell-based physical verification, replacing Cadence tools . We see a better than $50M dollar opportunity in replacing Cadence in cell-based physical verification. Calibre OPC also won two large orders from leading foundries, said Walden C. Rhines, chairman of the board and CEO of Mentor Graphics. Furthermore, our new HDL authoring tool for ASICs and FPGAs, HDL Designer Series, grew 50% over the year ago quarter, as customers are finding their existing tools just break at a million gates and they need a more robust solution.
During the quarter, Gartner Dataquest again reported Mentor Graphics was #1 in printed circuit board design software in its annual market share report. Autoactive® RE, Mentor’s next-generation tool for routing printed circuit boards, doubled sequentially as more customers moved to replace out-dated routers.
Mentor’s customer base continued to grow, registering about 130 new customers in the quarter. Market share and customer growth continued to pull through higher support revenue, which grew more than 20% over the year ago quarter.
We saw significant business activity at the Design Automation Conference with leads up 25%, while overall attendance was down 20%. We have a portfolio of tools that customers want, said Gregory K. Hinckley, president of Mentor Graphics. While our overall prospects are as good as they’ve ever been, we continue to see a lengthened deal cycle. Business is being deferred, however, not lost. Our large deal renewal cycle begins in the fourth quarter, improving our confidence and visibility for the latter half of the year and 2002. We expect to see a positive book-to-bill in the second half of the year.
During the quarter, Mentor launched remote access services to its Meta emulation products which generated significant customer interest. Meta’s emulation offering allows customers in need of advanced verification solutions to access Mentor emulation technology without capital expenditures. Mentor Meta emulation has been in high demand with some US customers moving design activity to Europe to access the technology.
SOURCE: COMPANY PRESS RELEASE
