SiliconBeat

There goes another independent public company headquartered cn Silicon Valley. Yesterday LogicVision, the San Jose provider of technology used to design and manufacture semiconductors, agreed to be acquired by Oregon-based Mentor Graphics.

Under the all-stock deal, each share of LogicVision will be converted into about one-fifth of a share of Mentor, which closed at $7.08 on Wednesday, the day before the deal was announced, giving LogicVision shareholders about $1.42 worth of Mentor shares for each LogicVision share they owned. Based on LogicVision’s closing price of 93 cents that same day, the deal represented about a 50 percent premium for LogicVision shareholders.

That premium is being whittled down Thursday as Mentor investors knock down its stock price. As of 11 a.m. PDT, Mentor shares were down 41 cents, or 6 percent, to $6.67, reducing the value of LogicVision shareholders own holdings to $1.33 per share and reducing the premium to 44 percent.

Late last year, Fremont’s Virage Logic, a provider of intellectual property to chip companies, offered to buy LogicVision for $1.05 per share, in cash, which represented a 114 percent premium to its then 49-cent per-share price the day before the unsolicited offer was made.

That deal was later called off by Virage Logic in the wake of a poison pill adopted by LogicVision’s board.

In a letter that began “Dear Wally”, Cadence Design Chief Executive Michael Fister explained to Walden Rhines, his counterpart at Mentor Graphics, why he was forced to go public with their offer to buy Mentor two months after the wooing began, so far to no avail. Read the rest of this entry »