Quickturn's Rapid Prototyping System and Synplicity's Certify Combined to Create Complete SoC Verification Environment

SAN JOSE & SUNNYVALE, Calif.----July 5, 2000-- Quickturn, a Cadence® Company (NYSE:CDN), the leading provider of high-performance verification systems, and Synplicity, Inc., a leading supplier of logic synthesis, physical synthesis, and verification software, today announced an OEM agreement to provide a complete verification environment for system-on-chip (SoC) designers.

Under terms of this agreement, Quickturn(TM) will integrate Synplicity's register-transfer-level (RTL) prototyping tool, Certify®, into the Quickturn Rapid Prototyping System(TM) (RPS) solution. This new offering delivers the ability to create functional hardware prototypes of designs before synthesis, allowing designers to perform hardware/software co-verification, IP integration, system software development, and more, all at or near system speeds, resulting in faster time-to-silicon for complex ICs and SoCs.

According to George Zafiropoulos, vice president of marketing at Quickturn, ``The combination of Quickturn's RPS and Certify enables designers to quickly prototype designs and dramatically accelerate hardware/software co-development. In addition, by using both the Quickturn RPS solution and Quickturn's MercuryPlus(TM) emulation systems, designers can leverage the strengths of both of these technologies to accelerate their SoC verification at an affordable price.''

``We are very pleased that Quickturn has chosen to leverage our popular Certify product and its advanced synthesis technology for their new Rapid Prototyping System,'' said Andy Haines, vice president of marketing for Synplicity®. ``In the past year, we have seen explosive growth in the adoption of RTL prototyping as designers struggle to overcome the verification bottleneck. The combination of the Quickturn RPS solution and Certify will provide designers with the best choice for prototype development.''

About Certify

Leveraging Synplicity's core synthesis and partitioning technologies, Certify allows designers to create functional hardware prototypes of their designs prior to ASIC synthesis. This unique approach results in higher performance and productivity than gate-level partitioning and implementation approaches, which require multiple iterations to achieve a suitable partitioning of the devices. It also enables faster time-to-market, especially for the one-million-gate-plus ASIC/SoC designs used for multimedia and communications applications.

Certify also enables extensive verification that previously could not be performed at the RT level without weeks of manual effort and modification of the RTL code. The creation of a functional hardware prototype at the RT level enables ASIC designers to perform the following tasks at or near system speed: hardware/software co-verification; algorithm development and verification; verification of intellectual property (either cores or library elements); system software development and debugging; verification of system-level protocol compatibility; and early system/product development with FPGAs.

About Quickturn's Rapid Prototyping System

To meet today's aggressive development schedules the design and verification of complex SoCs demands concurrent development of hardware and software. The re-configurable Quickturn Rapid Prototyping System solution leverages two fundamental technology trends to solve this problem: 1) the availability of high-density FPGAs and physical, bonded-out IP cores; and 2) the evolution of SoC designs to on-chip, bus-based architectures. The Quickturn RPS architecture is optimized to take advantage of both of these trends. Designers can also connect the RPS solution with the MercuryPlus emulation system to deliver a single system. As new logic is debugged in the emulation system, designers can migrate the logic to an IP core board that's plugged into an RPS, and then distributed to multiple RPS systems for software development. This results in dramatically shorter development cycles.

Pricing and Availability

The Quickturn RPS DeveloperPlus includes Synplicity's Certify product for FPGA RTL partitioning and synthesis, the system chassis, and configuration software. The Quickturn RPS DeveloperPlus product is expected to be available worldwide in Q3 2000. U.S. list price starts at $315,000.

About Synplicity

Founded in 1994, Synplicity, Inc. delivers the benefits of logic synthesis and embedded synthesis technologies to programmable logic and ASIC designers by developing fast, easy-to-use, affordable tools with extremely high quality of results. Synplicity products support industry-standard design languages (VHDL and Verilog), run on popular platforms (Windows 95/98, Windows NT and UNIX) and support leading PLD manufacturers. Synplicity is a Platinum member of the Cadence Connections Program (NYSE:CDN), Synopsys Liberty Program (Nasdaq:SNPS), and industry standards organizations. The company is located at 935 Stewart Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94086. Telephone: 408/215-6000; Fax: 408/990-0290; E-Mail: info@synplicity.com.

About Quickturn

Quickturn, a Cadence company, is the leading provider of high-performance verification solutions and Time-to-Market Engineering (TtME(TM)) services for the design and verification of complex IC and electronic systems. Quickturn products and services are used by developers of high-performance computing, multimedia, graphics, and communications systems. For more information, visit the Quickturn web site at http://www.quickturn.com, call 408/914-6000, or send email to info@quickturn.com.

About Cadence

Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design automation products, methodology services, and design services used to accelerate and manage the design of semiconductors, computer systems, networking and telecommunications equipment, consumer electronics, and a variety of other electronics-based products. With approximately 5,000 employees and 1999 annual revenue of $1.1 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities located around the world. The company is headquartered in San Jose, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. For more information, visit http://www.cadence.com.

Note to Editors: Synplicity and Certify are registered trademarks of Synplicity, Inc. Cadence and the Cadence logo, are registered, and Quickturn, MercuryPlus, and Rapid Prototyping System are trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Contact:
     Quickturn, A Cadence Company
     Sanjay Sawant, 408/914-6580
     ssawant@quickturn.com
       or
     Armstrong Kendall, Inc. for Quickturn
     Laura Garrett, 503/672-4690
     laura@akipr.com
       or
     Synplicity, Inc.
     John Gallagher, 408/215-6000
     johng@synplicity.com
       or
     Tsantes & Associates for Synplicity
     Lisa Neitzel, 408/369-1500 ext. 23
     lisa@tsantes.com