Why Valor???

Why Valor???

Many of you have heard that Mentor just completed the acquisition of Valor.  Mentor feels it will provide huge benefits for the industry.  Now Mentor is the first EDA vendor to be able to provide a design concept-through-manufacturing solution.  What does this really mean to the electronics industry??

Companies have been delivering products for years so what’s the big deal??  If you really look at the complete process it is divided into multiple separate silos: design of the PCB and data transfer, NPI, Fab of bare board, Mfg. process engineering to optimize the machine utilization, and finally the actual monitoring of manufacturing & quality.

In the design step, Mentor and other vendors supply the PCB Design solution, Valor the Design-for-Manufacturing (DFM) checkers.  These same DFM tools are typically used in manufacturing as the “golden” rule checker to point out any problems with the data as received.  Mentor will continue to improve these DFM tools both from a functionality point of view as well as the ability to be embedded into the design tools, both Mentor and non-Mentor,  and continually check as the design proceeds.   So shorter design times and fewer design re-spins.

Four years ago, Mentor purchased RSI and took steps to improve the design to manufacturing data transfer, design for test and the ability for designers and the rest of the product supply chain to collaborate electronically. These capabilities will make an excellent compliment to the Valor products.

Another step is to optimize the manufacturing process.  This directly addresses key business needs of companies: how to produce the product at the lowest manufacturing costs, and how to quickly reach and maintain targeted volume production levels.  Valor has focused on assembly optimization and how to best utilize the line and make sure it is properly set up and operated.  The combination of Mentor’s and Valor’s capabilities will also address the test area.

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Another strength of Valor is in monitoring the floor and the quality/failures from manufacturing.  Gathering data from inspection and test to determine if a machine is malfunctioning and producing problems.   That information can be fed back to the floor and the problems corrected to maintain high yields and rapid throughput..

But the design through manufacturing flow as a result of the acquisition can go farther.  Based on the operation and efficiency of the manufacturing floor, Manufacturers will be able to feed back changes to the DFM rules, discovered during the manufacturing process, that can further improve yields or cost for the current product or the next product to go through the line.

So this acquisition is a good deal.  For Mentor, for Valor and for the industry. Want to learn more? www.mentor.com/valor

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