Forte Design Systems And Summit Design Join Forces To Deliver An Enhanced SystemC to RTL Design, Synthesis, And Verification Environment

Integration of Cynthesizer and Vista SystemC IDE Greatly Improves Design Team Productivity and Workflow Management

San Jose and Los Altos, Calif - December 6, 2005 - Forte Design Systems, the leading provider of software products that enable higher level design, and Summit Design, Inc., a leading provider of electronic system-level (ESL) and hardware description language (HDL) design solutions, today announced their collaboration to deliver an integrated solution that combines the strengths of the Vista™ SystemC IDE and Cynthesizer™ SystemC synthesis products. This cooperation delivers a validated and supported flow that improves validation of SystemC behavioral code specifically targeted for Cynthesizer, providing a highly-productive design and verification flow.

Working with common customers who use Vista together with Cynthesizer, Summit and Forte have developed a proven, integrated flow. In the combined flow, designers use Vista as an integrated development environment (IDE) for design creation, simulation and debugging. The verified SystemC behavioral designs are then automatically input to Cynthesizer to produce high-quality RTL hardware implementations. This flow accelerates the path from SystemC to verified RTL, yielding better results in less time.

"We've been working with our customers and partners to continuously enhance support for the Cynthesizer production flow," said Brett Cline, vice president of customer operations and corporate communications at Forte Design Systems. "Integrating Vista with our industry-leading Cynthesizer will provide an enhanced SystemC flow, including creation, debug, and behavioral synthesis, reducing the time necessary to create complex ASICs and SoCs."

"Summit sees this collaboration as an important way to further accelerate the adoption of SystemC by completing the link from SystemC specification to RTL implementation," said Emil Girczyc, president and CEO of Summit Design. "Vista provides the level of debug and insight that customers need in order to more easily develop SystemC designs for Cynthesizer. For users, this results in faster time from specification to verified RTL."

About Forte's Cynthesizer

Forte's Cynthesizer is an innovative behavioral synthesis and design product that delivers an automated implementation path from SystemC to RTL. Cynthesizer, which is used for production at more than 15 leading semiconductor and systems companies, accelerates RTL delivery for leading-edge integrated circuits and systems-on-chip by automatically generating optimized RTL code from a SystemC behavioral description. Cynthesizer users experience a significant reduction in overall design time while improving quality of results.

About Summit's Vista IDE

Vista is a design environment for SystemC that combines both hardware and software concepts to speed design and debug of SystemC applications. It is easy to adopt, since it builds upon the industry standard gnu tools. It's unique Data Introspection, design exploration and debugging features make for more rapid understanding of designs and the verification process. Vista also offers advanced coding facilities, browsers, and a verification toolset targeted for high-level and transaction-level modeling. The unique debugging capabilities are possible because of its in-depth understanding of SystemC.

About Forte Design Systems

Forte Design Systems is a leading provider of software products that enable design at a higher level of abstraction. Forte's innovative behavioral synthesis technology allows design teams creating complex electronic systems from algorithmic designs using ASICs, FPGAs, and SoCs to significantly reduce their overall design and verification time. Forte is headquartered at 100 Century Center Court, San Jose, CA 95112. For more information, visit www.ForteDS.com.

About Summit

Summit Design's industry-leading ESL and HDL solutions enable SOC companies to deliver products that meet system-level performance and power targets with dramatically reduced schedule risk. Summit's products address engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation design phases of complex hardware/software systems. System Architect™ enables massive increases in design complexity and performance by analyzing architectural tradeoffs to arrive at optimized system specifications. Vista™ and Visual Elite™ ensure swift, successful design modeling and implementation in SystemC, Verilog, and VHDL. Top electronics companies worldwide, including leaders in the wireless, automotive, and consumer electronics space, have achieved dramatic reductions in design cycle time through their use of Summit's products. Summit Design is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. with offices throughout the US, Europe, Japan, Israel, and ROA. To learn more, please visit http://www.sd.com.