Synplicity and Actel Strengthen OEM Relationship for Best-In-Class EDA Solutions

Companies Deliver Unparalleled Value to FPGA Designers

Sunnyvale, Calif. and Mountain View, Calif., May 1, 2006 — Synplicity, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNP), a leading provider of software for the design and verification of semiconductors, and Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) today announced that the companies have expanded their OEM agreement to provide exceptional value and a deep, on-going technology roadmap for Actel customers. Under the terms of the multi-year agreement, Actel obtains the right to distribute the Synplify Pro®, Identify® and Synplify® DSP software solutions to its customers as part of its Libero® Integrated Design Environment (IDE). The expanded agreement will also provide Actel customers with future access to Synplicity's innovative physical synthesis technology.

"Actel's customers are the big winners with this expanded OEM agreement," said Dennis Kish, senior vice president of marketing and sales at Actel. "By delivering Synplicity's best-in-class tools as part of our Libero IDE at current prices, we provide designers an incredible value. We continue to be impressed by the performance and ease of use consistently offered by Synplicity's products and believe these tools will help our customers achieve excellent results."

Joe Gianelli, Synplicity's vice president of business development, said, "Actel delivers a broad range of advanced FPGA solutions, including its low-cost ProASIC3 for value-based applications, high-density RTAX-S for space applications and the new Actel Fusion™ Programmable System Chip family, which is unique in its ability to support mixed-signal designs. We have been working closely with Actel to optimize our leading-edge technologies to capitalize on the features of these architectures. We believe that through this close partnership, we can offer Actel's customers advanced design tools that will enable them to achieve optimal device performance."

This expanded OEM agreement leverages the strengths of each company to improve the FPGA designer's experience. Synplicity is the FPGA synthesis market and technology leader with a 67 percent market share*. Focusing on delivering innovative single-chip FPGA solutions, Actel has a long-term strategy of teaming with leading software tools vendors to provide a best-in-class design environment. Actel and Synplicity have worked closely to integrate Synplicity's tools into the Libero IDE. Actel is the only FPGA vendor to distribute the industry-leading Synplify Pro software, providing Libero Platinum users with improved quality of results (QoR) and advanced implementation features.

This agreement also bolsters Actel's hardware debugging capabilities by adding the Identify RTL debugger to the Gold and Platinum versions of the Libero IDE. The Identify product is a debug-centric verification tool that offers the fastest method of finding errors in a design by providing simulator-like visibility into a live, running FPGA. The Identify RTL Debugger is the first tool to allow designers to instrument and debug directly in RTL source code.

For designers of DSP systems, the addition of Synplicity's Synplify DSP software to the Libero IDE enables a seamless flow from The Mathworks' Simulink design environment to RTL design. Synplify DSP software uniquely uses proprietary system-level synthesis algorithms to automatically generate highly optimized RTL code ready for logic synthesis, eliminating prior hand-coded, error-prone and time-consuming methodologies requiring numerous iterations between the DSP algorithm architect and the RTL hardware designer.

About the Libero Integrated Design Environment

Actel's Libero IDE offers best-in-class tools from leading third-party EDA vendors and custom-developed tools from Actel integrated into a single FPGA development package. The Libero tool suite supports mixed-mode design entry input, giving designers the choice of mixing either high-level VHDL or Verilog HDL language blocks with schematic modules in a design.

Availability

This rich software collection is available from Actel as part of Actel's Libero IDE. The Platinum edition of the software is priced at $2495 for Windows and $4995 for Unix. Further, the Identify RTL debug solution is available in the free Gold edition of the Libero IDE.

About Actel

Actel Corporation is the leader in single-chip FPGA solutions. The company is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol ACTL and is headquartered at 2061 Stierlin Court, Mountain View, Calif., 94043-4655. For more information about Actel, visit http://www.actel.com. Telephone: 888-99-ACTEL (992-2835).

About Synplicity

Synplicity, Inc. (Nasdaq:SYNP - News) is a leading supplier of innovative software solutions that enable the rapid and effective design of Programmable Logic Devices (FPGAs, PLDs and CPLDs) that serve a wide range of communications, military/aerospace, consumer, semiconductor, computer, and other electronic systems markets. Synplicity's tools provide outstanding performance, cost and time-to-market benefits by simplifying, improving and automating key design planning, logic synthesis, physical synthesis and verification functions for FPGA, FPGA-based ASIC verification, and DSP designers. Synplicity is the number one supplier of FPGA synthesis solutions and has been rated #1 in customer satisfaction in 2004 and 2005 in EE Times' Annual FPGA Customer Survey. Synplicity products support industry-standard design languages (VHDL and Verilog) and run on popular platforms. The company operates in over 20 facilities worldwide and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information visit http://www.synplicity.com.

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