Industry Expert Blogs

Wally Rhines (President and CEO of Mentor, A Siemens Business) has been pushing a contrarian view versus the conventional wisdom that the semiconductor business, and by extension EDA, is slowing down. He pitched this at DVCon and more recently at U2U where I got to hear the pitch and talk to him afterwards.

What causes maturing is saturation – the available market that can be divided among providers doesn’t have much room to grow, or rather will grow only relatively slowly. That triggers consolidation – you eat your competitors, they eat you, or you shrivel up and die because you’re too small to compete. The big guys continue to make money through efficiencies of scale, aka laying off a bunch of people in duplicated functions after a merger. So for some (eg Mark Edelstone at Morgan Stanley in late 2015), the wave of consolidations in semiconductors pointed to a maturing industry.

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