Siemens to buy chip debugging specialist Lauterbach to grow its EDA unit

Siemens has agreed to buy Lauterbach, a German company that makes tools for finding and fixing bugs in chips and the software that runs on them, but the price was not disclosed.

Founded in 1979 by brothers Lothar and Stephan Lauterbach, the company is based in Höhenkirchen, near Munich. It employs about 170 people and made around €60m in revenue last year.

Lauterbach is best known for TRACE32, a range of debugging and tracing tools. Engineers use them to see what is happening inside a chip as its software runs, and to track down errors. The company has more than 1,200 customers, mostly in the car, chip and telecoms industries.

The deal will become part of Siemens’ electronic design automation (EDA) business, which sells software for designing and testing chips. Siemens built that business mainly through its purchase of Mentor Graphics in 2017.

Siemens already sells hardware systems that imitate a chip before it is made, so that designers can test it early. By adding Lauterbach’s tools, it wants to let customers check the chip and its software together. As a result, they could start writing and testing software before the physical chip exists, and find problems sooner.

This matters more as chips and software become harder to separate. Cars, for example, are increasingly controlled by software, while AI and connected devices need chips and code designed side by side.

Cedrik Neike, who heads Siemens’ Digital Industries division, said semiconductors are a core part of the company’s technology strategy. The deal, he said, would let customers test and improve their products before the chip is made.

“With Lauterbach, we are further extending our industry-leading EDA portfolio for semiconductor design by bringing together our premier hardware-assisted verification portfolio with its industry-leading software debugging technologies,” said Cedrik Neike, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and President of Digital Industries.

For its part, Lauterbach said its customer focus would stay the same.

“Our commitment to keeping our customers at the center of everything we do remains unchanged,” said Stephan Lauterbach, the company’s co-founder and chief technology officer.

He and Thomas Ullmann will stay on at Siemens once the deal is completed. Siemens also expects the deal to bring significant extra sales.

The acquisition is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to regulatory approval. Besides Germany, Lauterbach has offices in the UK, Italy, France, Tunisia, the US, Japan and China.

The deal adds to Siemens’ growing push into chips and industrial AI. Elsewhere, the company has been testing humanoid robots with Nvidia at its own factory in Erlangen.