Changing Times: Siemens Plans to Sell Former Mentor Graphics Wilsonville Campus

Estimated reading time: 3 minutes

Siemens announced it will be selling its Wilsonville, Oregon, property, which has served as the campus for Mentor Graphics, which was later acquired by German EDA-giant Siemens, as reported by The Oregonian on April 20. Siemens will maintain one building on the sprawling 53-acre campus, citing the move to hybrid and remote work over the past few years as a key factor in the decision.

But Siemens and its Wilsonville campus is the ending of a story that goes back to 1981, when a group of seven Tektronix managers and engineers left their company with a goal to change how electronics were designed. 

It was a Cinderella story: Young tech professionals, most under 40, scored $1 million in venture capital ($4.25M today), and celebrated by piling all the founders into one pickup truck to deposit the big check at the drive-through window of the local bank branch. Can you imagine being that teller? 

The engineers formed Mentor Graphics, and went about building most of their initial software using folding tables as office furniture. Long hours and hundreds of thousands of lines of Pascal code later, Mentor launched the IDEA suite of tools: SYMED, NETED, SIM, and DOC. Their goal was to create a digital breadboarding space for electronics engineers. NETED was the schematic capture tool, SYMED the symbol creation app. SIM was the logic simulator running on the schematics, and DOC was a surprisingly high-powered word processor tightly integrated to the design tools to make project documentation easy. It was a tool configuration that printed money by the truckload. 

Mentor Graphics went public about 36 months after incorporating. At that time, R&D was developing new tools for IC design (ChipGraph) and making its first mergers and acquisitions, such as a San Jose-based company developing PCB design tools. 

I was hired by Mentor Graphics as a college summer intern in 1984, where I wrote utilities to support the printers used to generate design output. After graduating in 1985, Mentor Graphics offered me a full-time job, where I stayed until 1994, working first in software engineering, then marketing.

By the late 1980s, Mentor Graphics had grown to 2,000 employees, with engineering and sales offices scattered around the globe. The headquarters in Beaverton filled six leased buildings; it was time to stop renting and buy a permanent home.

With the purchase of a plot of unbuilt Tektronix land immediately adjacent to the Tektronix Wilsonville plant, Mentor Graphics broke ground about eight years after its founding. The first phase of construction included four office buildings: a manufacturing building, a warehouse, a commons with a cafeteria, gym, and convenience store, and a daycare center for employees’ children. A seasonal creek, which ran through the middle of the property, was widened and deepened to create a cascading series of small ponds, thereby providing flood control and additional wetland habitat to the local area. The Oregonian reported that the daycare will continue to operate on campus for at least another month.

The Oregonian also spent significant time speaking with Gerry Langeler, Mentor Graphics founder and first COO, who shared his view that the campus was the right kind of facility for a creative engineering company in the 1990s and that things have changed in the 35 years since. After all, 35 years is a very long time in software, and the electronics that Mentor Graphics helped develop have contributed to the dramatic changes in our work environment.

Whereas a company like Mentor Graphics once needed desk space for every employee, work methods have changed. But the recent newspaper article focused primarily on the decision to end the daycare program, which was a major recruitment and retention tool at the time. But the shift to hybrid work and reduced demand for dedicated office space also meant the program is now less widely used. Still, it’s been reported that approximately 70 families will be affected by this closure, and the local Wilsonville community lacks sufficient private daycare to absorb the needs of the children.