Cool Verification

This morning I got another one of Cooley's Industry Gadfly's via email.  According to Cooley (and Yahoo Finance), Synopsys announced that they are now Intel's "primary electronic design automation supplier."  Cooley was surprised that Intel would ever announce a preferred supplier like this.  So am I.  During the time I worked at Intel we were not supposed to share info about who our suppliers were, and suppliers were also not allowed to mention they were selling to us.  Cooley was also shocked ("WTF????" was the exact phrase he used) that Cadence wasn't the one to pull this off, given the fact that Mike Fister spent 17 years at Intel before joining Cadence as the CEO. 

For my part, I'm curious to know how much Cadence and Mentor lost out on the deal, given that each one likely has/had decently sized agreements to sell specific tools to Intel.  I also got to thinking - could last week's announcement of the OVM be somehow related?  The Synopsys/Intel announcement seems like just the thing to pull Cadence and Mentor together.  Am I the only one who has had this thought?  As always, comments welcome.

Update June 18, 2008: For my comments on Cadence's proposed buyout of Mentor Graphics check out my post entitled Cadence Offers to Buy Mentor - A Verification Consultant's Perspective.

Earlier this week a few colleagues of mine passed along the news that Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (CDNS) and Mentor Graphics Corp (MENT) were teaming up to develop a common verification methodology called the "Open SystemVerilog Verification Methodology".  Keeping with what appears to be a common trend when naming verification methodologies, the acronym will be OVM.  (See my Verilab colleague Avidan Efody's take on the announcement).