I think I’m the last to pick up on this

Personally I like Wally Rhines presentations about EDA  and the anarchist in me is rooting for the small guy. But I think everyone is  overlooking Mentor’s system-level design flows.

Having a history in a System Level EDA company, it does seem to me that Catapult has quite a bit of ESL traction. As far as DFM goes, I’m still undecided about it - I heard that DFM crews were laid off in Cadence earlier. My opinion is that Cadence is going all-out on the “All You Can Eat Buffet” theory. This way it gets a load of verification tools (0-In, OVM/SystemVerilog) and readymade traction in design companies like ST, which are heavy on Synopsys. 

In addition, Synopsys did this weird Synplicity thinggy, and I think Cadence needed a FPGA/DSP counterbalance.

If I was a betting man, I would say that DFT/DFM would be a few rungs down in the spin sheet. But yes, I would say it is safe to keep the DFM card under the pillow in case the oft-rumored Cadence sellout does happen (as Sramana points out, maybe to TSMC)

However, what will  be the most interesting aspect of all this is the poison pill that Wally and Co. will almost definitely try to create - quite similar to what Jerry Yang conceived, which actually incentivizes employees to leave the company and claim substantial benefits and golden handshakes citing “unsurmountable change in work conditions”, in case of a takeover.

Mentor’s stock price shows a play of +/- 20%, whereas Cadence has taken a dip of 50% since July 2007. Cadence’s marketing guys will have to come up with some lines equally convincing for this deal to happen.