AMCC Validates Network Processor Software With Carbon's VSP(TM); 10s of Billions of Cycles Thoroughly Ring-Out Hardware.

WALTHAM, Mass. -- Carbon Design Systems -- a leader in virtual system prototyping -- announced today that its Virtual System Prototype (VSP) product was instrumental in enabling AMCC to validate their latest generation network processor software on a virtual model of the nP3705 processor hardware. Accurate modeling of the hardware was essential to ensure that the software being debugged would actually operate as expected on silicon.

In choosing Carbon's VSP over other ESL vendors' software and hardware-based offerings, AMCC required that the virtual model generated had to match the silicon cycle for cycle and have the performance to validate their complex diagnostic and firmware code that runs on the processor -- no small task. The heart of VSP is an optimizing RTL compiler that generates a high-performance virtual model that is cycle and register accurate to the real hardware. This virtual model also incorporated a number of bus transactors from Carbon's extensive library of state-of-the-art protocols including: Ethernet (MII, GMII, and XGMII), memory (DDR, QDR, and SRAM), Utopia 2, SPI 3, and SPI 4.2.

"We're extremely pleased with performance and value provided to us by VSP," stated John McKenna, Director of Software Engineering at AMCC. "We found real bugs and executed corner-cases that would have been impossible with traditional EDA tools. VSP leveraged our compute farm by allowing us to run many tests in parallel for an aggregate of 10s of billions of test cycles."

"Carbon makes it easy and economical to deploy virtual prototypes of a complete system. Our VSP platform makes RTL import a snap. It is also easy to combine other system components utilizing our rich set of bus transactors," said Matthew Bellantoni, Product Marketing Manager at Carbon Design Systems.

About AMCC

AMCC is a global leader in network and embedded PowerPC processing, optical transport and storage solutions. Our products enable the development of converged IP-based networks offering high-speed secure data, high-definition video and high-quality voice for carrier, metropolitan, access and enterprise applications. AMCC provides networking equipment vendors with industry-leading network and communications processing, Ethernet, SONET and switch fabric solutions. AMCC is also the leading vendor of high-port count SATA RAID controllers enabling low-cost, high-performance, high-capacity storage. AMCC's corporate headquarters are located in Sunnyvale, California. Sales and engineering offices are located throughout the world. For further information regarding AMCC, please visit our website at http://www.amcc.com.

About Carbon

Carbon is delivering a high-performance virtual system prototyping solution that enables a system prototype to be rapidly assembled and functionally validated on the desktop months before silicon. Carbon's new software approach allows multiple levels of abstraction to be validated together including C, SystemC, RTL, IP cores, transaction-level, and instruction-level models. The key to VSP is silicon accuracy and performance; the ability to execute billions of cycles and boot embedded operating systems, all with desktop software.

The company is headquartered at 375 Totten Pond Road, Suite 100/200, Waltham, MA. 02451. Telephone: [phone], Fax: [phone], Email: [e-mail], website: www.carbondesignsystems.com.

Carbon Design Systems and VSP are trademarks of Carbon Design Systems, Incorporated. All other companies and products referenced herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.