原创 Consolidation in the ESL market

It was long expected that CoWare would go IPO and pave the way for the rest of the electronic systems level design market to take off. However, it now appears that Virtio, VAST and Virtutech have beaten CoWare to the punch, having found market exits through acquisition. This leaves CoWare as one of the few remaining, mid range independent ES level companies (or so it was until Synopsys announced they were acquiring CoWare on Feb 8th).

 However as their platforms matured, each found its own niche- Virtio for TI based wireless devices, VAST for automotive, and Virtutech for networking. Among the big three in EDA, Mentor has been the most consistent in pursuing a system level design approach, both building up its tools for system level design and modeling and acquiring embedded software companies to try to automate the architecture to implementation path. With Synopsys now building up its system level design and modeling tools, a number of questions come up.
Will Synopsys buy an embedded software vendor to automate the path to system implementation? I wouldnt hold my breath on this one though stranger things have happened.
With ARM and Intel now in the platform business (TI went down part of this path in the 90s) with their accompanying tools, will EDA companies begin to compete with their own users?