Analysis: Synopsys-Coverity Deal Final

Ed Sperling, Semiconductor Engineering
March 26th, 2014

Analysis: Acquisition closes after just five weeks, setting No. 1 EDA company on a different but potentially lucrative path.

Synopsys’ acquisition of Coverity, which makes tools for testing and analyzing software, was made official yesterday. Now what?

That may be the $334 million question, which is the price Synopsys paid for the 11-year-old software tools vendor. Even Synopsys’ top executives are rather candid in their uncertainty about where this deal will lead, and they made no qualms about that at the Synopsys User Group this week. Dealing with a slew of companies ranging from McAfee to SAP to Barclays is well outside the EDA and IP space. But they’re certainly not questioning the value of the deal. As more of the functionality in hardware is controlled by software, this acquisition appears to be less of a leap than it looks from an EDA-centric vantage point.