Industry Summary Articles

• Acquisition strengthens Mentor integrated circuit (IC) design and verification technology for automotive, enhances ISO 26262 functional safety testing via Siemens' digital twin offering

• Innovative technology performs fault simulation at orders of magnitude faster than competing solutions

• Acquisition builds upon Siemens' digitalization strategy and investments in the IC market, enabling customers to realize innovation

Siemens has entered into an agreement to acquire Austin, Texas-based Austemper Design Systems Inc., a startup software company that offers analysis, auto-correction and simulation technology. This technology allows customers to test and harden IC designs for functional safety in applications such as automotive, industrial and aerospace systems where functional safety and high reliability are mandatory for compliance to safety standards like ISO 26262.

ICs in these applications require three types of functional safety verification: for systemic faults, malicious faults and random hardware faults. Mentor's existing Questa™ software is a leading technology for functional verification of systemic faults and provides solutions for verification of malicious faults for IC security. The software technology from Austemper adds state-of-the-art safety analysis, auto-correction and fault simulation technology to address random hardware faults – expanding on Mentor's existing functional safety leadership offerings of the Tessent™ product suite and the Veloce™ platform to provide the most complete end-to-end solution.

Design teams at leading semiconductor and IP companies use Austemper's innovative technology to analyze the registered-transfer level (RTL) code versions of their designs for faults and vulnerabilities. It can automatically correct and harden vulnerable areas, subsequently performing fault simulation to ensure the design is hardened and no longer susceptible to errors. Moreover, the Austemper technology performs simulation at orders of magnitude faster than competing solutions.

Siemens will integrate Austemper's technology into Mentor's IC verification portfolio as part of Siemens' larger digitalization strategy, leveraging Siemens' world-wide sales channel to make this world-class functional safety solution available to companies developing digital twins of safety-critical systems at the heart of autonomous vehicles, smart cities and industrial equipment in Factory 4.0.

"With this acquisition, we continue to build on our commitment to helping our customers quickly bring to market innovations in autonomous vehicles, smart factories and smart cities," said Tony Hemmelgarn, president and CEO of Siemens PLM Software. "In all of these markets, customers need to innovate more nimbly, but it is imperative they also build these systems with the highest degree of safety in mind. The Austemper technology added to the Mentor IC portfolio, along with the Teamcenter portfolio and Polarion ALM software, will give customers the ability to develop and test digital twins of their systems for the highest degrees of functional safety before manufacture and deployment."

The terms of the transaction are not disclosed. Siemens expects to close the transaction in July 2018.

To view the original press release, please click here.

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