Siemens to Acquire Lauterbach to Join Chip Verification and Software Debug

The core of the announcement is short. Siemens has signed an agreement to acquire Lauterbach, and describes Lauterbach as “a leading provider of debug and trace solutions for embedded software and complex system-on-chip (SoC) architectures.” Lauterbach develops what Siemens calls “comprehensive, modular and extensible development and verification tools for microprocessors and embedded CPU cores in the form of hardware-assisted debuggers and real-time trace tools.” The announcement is dated 10 November 2026 and was issued by Siemens AG from Munich, with a matching release from Lauterbach at its headquarters in Höhenkirchen-Siegertsbrunn near Munich.

Siemens describes the agreement as a planned acquisition and says it expects the transaction to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals. Lauterbach’s own release says that, “following Closing and as part of Siemens,” the company will take its “Enabling Embedded Innovations” claim to the next level, creating distinctive value for customers from early chip design to final system verification.

Stephan Lauterbach and Thomas Ullmann continue after closing

Siemens says it is “delighted that Stephan Lauterbach and Thomas Ullmann will continue their work as part of Siemens following the closing of the transaction.” Lauterbach’s management board page (opens in a new tab) shows what each does. Stephan Lauterbach, co-owner and Chief Technology Officer, is responsible for the entire development department. Dr. Thomas Ullmann joined the company in March 2020 and oversees finance, human resources and strategic corporate development. Siemens also says it will build on “the impressive legacy that founders Lothar and Stephan Lauterbach and their team have achieved over the past decades” and is pleased to welcome the Lauterbach group to Siemens.

Lauterbach’s company history page (opens in a new tab) dates the business to 1979, when, the company says, it quickly established itself as a market leader in in-circuit emulators and JTAG debug tools. Its first major breakthrough came in 1983 with TRACE80, an in-circuit emulator for the Z80 and other 8-bit CPUs, and the company moved into a new office building in Hofolding near Munich. TRACE32 followed in 1989 as an in-circuit emulator for 8-, 16- and 32-bit microprocessors. Lauterbach says it was highly modular, which allowed support to extend over the years to up to 15 microprocessor architectures.

The product line then followed the industry’s move to more complex chips. The company launched its first JTAG debugger in 1996, added parallel trace ports in 1998 and trace-based debugging in 1999, which lets engineers move forwards and backwards through recorded trace information to find what led to faulty behaviour. Linux-aware debugging arrived in 2000, multicore debugging from 2003, and in 2005 support for Qualcomm’s Hexagon took TRACE32 to its 50th core milestone. In 2018 it added MC/DC code coverage without instrumentation, and in the same year its TRACE32 Tool Qualification Support-Kit was certified by TÜV NORD.

A footprint of 11 branch offices and more than 20 resellers

Lauterbach describes a worldwide presence of 11 branch offices and more than 20 technical value-added resellers. Its release lists branch offices in the United Kingdom, Italy, France, Tunisia, on the East and West Coast of the United States, in Japan and in China, with highly qualified sales and support engineers in many other countries. The company also says that over 80% of its staff are highly qualified and trained engineers, many of whom take part in international standards committees. Its management board (opens in a new tab) comprises founder Lothar Lauterbach, co-owner and Chief Technology Officer Stephan Lauterbach and Dr. Thomas Ullmann.

Siemens puts the company’s scale in numbers: around 170 people, more than 1,200 global customers and roughly €60 million in revenue in 2025. Those customers span automotive, semiconductors and telecommunications, among other industries, and Lauterbach says its customers range from small companies to the world’s largest technology leaders. The company describes its tools as used “from renewable energies to smartphones to vehicles.”

TRACE32 is the name under which Lauterbach sells its debug and trace tools. Its home page (opens in a new tab) describes the family as covering the entire product life cycle, from pre-silicon, cloud-based development through prototyping and testing to in-field analysis. The software at the centre is TRACE32 PowerView, which Lauterbach says is used as a pure software solution to analyse RTL simulations, emulations and virtual targets on remote PCs and in the cloud, and, with its hardware extensions, to test targets in the field through interfaces such as USB or XCP.

The hardware side comes in modules. According to Lauterbach, the PowerDebug System is a modular, flexible debug system that adapts as teams move from project to project and chip to chip, trace extensions collect information while the system under examination runs normally and without interruption, and software-only solutions allow analysis of virtual targets in the cloud, use of a built-in instruction set simulator and closed-chassis debugging in the field. Its Why Lauterbach page (opens in a new tab) adds that the modular design means a configuration can be upgraded or modified for the next project, and that everything is driven by the same user interface.

The XuanTie C950 release shows how support for new processors is added

A recent release shows how that breadth is maintained. On 15 September 2026 Lauterbach announced (opens in a new tab) that TRACE32 supports Alibaba’s XuanTie C950, a 64-bit RISC-V processor core that Lauterbach describes as the highest-performance RISC-V computing flagship processor to date. Lauterbach says the C950 achieves a single-core score of over 70 points on the SPECint-2006 benchmark and features a superscalar, out-of-order microarchitecture with up to 8 cores per cluster and clock speeds reaching 3.2 GHz. TRACE32 support covers simultaneous debugging of the processor cores and “non-intrusive processor trace capture,” and Lauterbach says its tools handle both parallel off-chip trace and serial high-speed trace via HSSTP.

The same release quotes Dr. Chunqiang Li, Vice President of RISC-V at Alibaba DAMO Academy, who says XuanTie and Lauterbach have continued to deepen their collaboration, gradually covering basic debugging, multicore debugging, trace analysis and performance profiling. Lauterbach’s emulators and virtual targets page (opens in a new tab) lists, among others, Veloce CS, Synopsys HAPS-200 and ZeBu-200, Cadence Palladium and Protium, Arm Fast Models and QEMU, and the company says TRACE32 supports by far the most virtual targets and third-party simulators in the tool industry.

Siemens’ side of the workflow is its Veloce CS family (opens in a new tab). Siemens describes Veloce CS as a hardware, software and system validation platform made up of Veloce Strato CS for emulation, Veloce Primo CS for enterprise prototyping and Veloce proFPGA CS for software prototyping. The platforms share the same Veloce hardware and software architecture, which Siemens calls congruency, so that users can move an environment from one platform to another with minimal effort.

Siemens’ Veloce page makes the case for starting software work earlier. Its “Software Rising” section states that software development and validation is the bottleneck in today’s system design flow across all industries, and that the Veloce CS System pulls the software development cycle in earlier, verifying application software, enabling power and performance analysis at system level, and benchmarking the entire system in a targeted application environment.

A single view of chip and software behaviour

That is where Lauterbach enters. In the announcement, Siemens says that bringing together previously separate workflows into a single solution is meant to give customers a unified hardware and software view of how increasingly complex ASIC and SoC devices behave. It describes this as a shift-left approach that helps customers analyse hardware and software interactions at an early stage and significantly shortens the time to market for new software-defined products. The planned combined solution, it says, will let customers develop and verify embedded software even earlier, and well before the physical chip is available.

Siemens’ EDA site (opens in a new tab) places the same idea inside its hardware-software co-design offer: realistic workload development and testing for early, pre-silicon software development, visibility into performance and power consumption, and synchronised communication between domains, systems, protocols and tools. A customer quoted on that site, Karima Dridi of Arm, describes the result of using Veloce at scale.

Siemens AG describes itself as a leading technology company focused on industry, infrastructure, mobility and healthcare, and as a leader in industrial AI. In fiscal 2025, which ended on 30 September 2025, the Siemens Group generated revenue of €78.9 billion and net income of €10.4 billion, and it employed around 318,000 people worldwide. It also owns a majority stake in the publicly listed company Siemens Healthineers. The announcement quotes Cedrik Neike, Member of the Managing Board of Siemens AG and President Digital Industries, and lists the Siemens Digital Industries Software PR team as a press contact.

Siemens’ recent software history gives the Lauterbach agreement context. On 26 March 2025 it completed the acquisition (opens in a new tab) of Altair Engineering Inc., a provider of software in the industrial simulation and analysis market, for an enterprise value of approximately USD 10 billion. Siemens said at the time that Altair added capabilities in mechanical and electromagnetic simulation, high-performance computing, data science and AI, and that the acquisition was part of its ONE Tech Company program and would meaningfully increase its digital revenue share. Roland Busch, President and CEO of Siemens AG, said Altair’s innovations would help create “the world's most complete AI-powered design, engineering and simulation portfolio.”

From simulation at Altair to verification and debug at Lauterbach

The two transactions address different layers. Altair, in Siemens’ words, extended its leadership in simulation and industrial AI. Lauterbach, by Siemens’ account, extends the electronic design automation portfolio for semiconductor design, a field where the announcement says Siemens is further establishing its position as “one of the world's leading electronic design automation (EDA) powerhouses.” Siemens EDA describes a portfolio that spans IC design and verification, 3D IC, chiplet, advanced packaging and test workflows, and PCB and electronic systems design, and says it is bringing secure generative and agentic AI into production EDA environments.

The announcement also places an expectation on the commercial side. Siemens says it expects significant revenue synergies from the transaction, and that Lauterbach and Siemens solutions are already used by numerous mutual customers. Siemens states the expectation without a quantified target, and this report does not add one.

Closing is the next milestone. Siemens says the transaction is expected to close in the first half of 2027, subject to customary closing conditions and required regulatory approvals, and it describes the deal throughout as a planned acquisition. The agreement is signed and the transaction is not yet complete.

For customers, the two companies give the same message. Stephan Lauterbach says: “Our commitment to keeping our customers at the center of everything we do remains unchanged.” Lauterbach’s release says that, after closing and as part of Siemens, it will take its “Enabling Embedded Innovations” claim to the next level. Lauterbach’s own pages describe what customers already know: over 80% of staff are engineers, the company says it is renowned for fast response times, deep processor expertise and lifetime product support, and its tools integrate with third-party tools at every stage of development.

TRACE32 already works with partners and chip makers

Lauterbach describes an open software interface and long-standing relationships with chip manufacturers and IP providers, operating system providers, compiler vendors and customers, which it says allows it to support recent advances in embedded systems design, often long before a new chip arrives on the market. The company says the same interfaces let customers choose the tools that meet their needs at every stage of development. Those are the relationships and interfaces that continue into the closing period, and Siemens has not announced changes to them.

The timeline below places the agreement on the path from Lauterbach’s start in 1979 to the expected close. The dates up to 10 November 2026 are completed events from company sources, and the closing is shown as expected until it happens.