Mentor Graphics Inc, Beaverton, Oregon is to acquire Silicon Compiler Systems Corp, and has chosen Sun Microsystems Inc as its second supplier of workstations after the Apollo division of Hewlett-Packard Co. It will issue about 6.3m new shares for Silicon, valuing the company at about $110m. Created in 1987 from the merger of Silicon Design Labs with Silicon Compilers Inc, Silicon Compiler Systems has a spread of integrated chip design systems running on Sun, Apollo and DEC hardware, and pioneered logic synthesis, mixed analogue and digital simulation, compilation and symbolic circuit layout. It employs nearly 400 people and has an installed base of over 1,700 chip design positions, doing $45m in 1989.Sun, which will be supplying its Sparc-based systems under the agreement, and says that the electronic design automation market is already one of its biggest, accounting for 19% of fiscal 1989 hardware sales.
