Mentor Graphics (5,700 employees, headquartered in Wilsonville, Oregon, USA), known to electronics engineers for its PCB, FPGA, IC and SoC design software, but not limited to that, will soon become part of the “global technology powerhouse” Siemens. The merger is part of Siemens’, as its CEO put it, “Vision 2020 concept to be the Benchmark for the New Industrial Age”, whatever that may mean.

2016 seems to be the year of consolidation in the electronics industry; we have witnessed several important mergers in the past few months. Is this only the beginning of a trend and will we see more of this the coming years? Who will take over Siemens?

Probably not HP, that seems to go the other way and keeps on splitting. After separating itself from Agilent that in turn spat out Keysight, the company recently announced that it will split into two separate entities: Hewlett Packard Enterprise and HP Inc.

It feels like watching the movements of celestial objects. Stars getting born. Stars colliding, creating even bigger stars; I am no astrophysicist but don’t some stars that grow too big collapse under their own weight and turn into black holes, sucking up everything around them and from where there is no escape, for nothing, not even light? Whatever. Starship enterprise continues its voyage, it left Major Tom behind already.