AMD Honored by the EDA Consortium for ASIC Design Using Silicon Perspective's First Encounter; Award to be Given Today at Luncheon Sponsored by EDA Consortium and EE Times.

Business Editors

Design Automation Conference

LOS ANGELES--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 5, 2000

Silicon Perspective Corporation(R) (SPC), a leading supplier of front-end physical design solutions for integrated circuits (ICs), today announced that its customer, AMD, will receive this year's EDA Consortium Design Achievement Award. AMD is being honored for its design of an Ethernet-switch application specific integrated circuit (ASIC) that was created using leading EDA tools, including SPC's First Encounter(TM) product. AMD's SwitchIT(TM) F12M device design team will receive the award today at a luncheon sponsored by the EDA Consortium and EE Times.

The EDA Consortium and EE Times bestow the Design Achievement Award to acknowledge the efforts of design teams that optimize the use of commercial EDA tools to develop innovative integrated circuit (IC) and systems technology. The award sponsors select winning teams for design achievement and excellence in ICs and systems developed in computer, networking, telecommunications, consumer, semiconductor, military/aerospace, and industrial/automotive/medical product categories.

The team at AMD brought Silicon Perspective's First Encounter tool into the ASIC design project near the end of the design process, and used the tool to quickly reach timing closure on the SwitchIT F12M Ethernet switch IC. They used the product on the entire design, which consisted of three partitions. The SwitchIT F12M includes 12 Fast Ethernet ports and a 1Gigabit Ethernet port. In total, the design contains 256,000 placeable cells, or 135 macros, and approximately 8 million transistors. The chip runs mostly at 100 MHz, with a clock rate of up to 125 MHz.

John Szetela, Design Technology CAD Manager at AMD said, "The First Encounter demo we saw was impressive, but I didn't think that SPC could ramp up in time to benefit the project. SPC came in and had the library and technology files converted within an hour, and we finished the first place and route of the entire chip that same afternoon after getting the netlist for the first time. To our surprise, the floorplan compared favorably to what we created with our existing flow, and it was completed without designer input and in less than one day.

After having them duplicate the chip-level partitions that we had already been working with, we had to correlate the timing results from First Encounter with our own backend `golden' router and extraction flow. The data were within 10-to-12% for all nets and cycle time for timing closure was reduced from days to minutes. Iteration times are extremely fast in First Encounter, and with our logic designers guiding the tool, we had timing closure on two of the three major modules within one week."

About AMD

AMD is a global supplier of integrated circuits for the personal and networked computer and communications markets. AMD produces microprocessors, flash memories, and integrated circuits for communications and networking applications. Founded in 1969 and based in Sunnyvale, California, AMD had revenues of $2.9 billion in 1999. (NYSE:AMD).

About SPC

Silicon Perspective Corporation is the pioneer and technology leader in Front-End Physical Design Environment tools and methodology for the deep sub-micron (DSM) System-on-Chip (SoC) market. SPC's technology brings an unprecedented level of speed, accuracy, ease-of-use, and timing optimization to front-end physical design. Its integrated tool suite bridges the current gap between the logic and physical design teams, accelerating the completion of timing-correct silicon and providing more efficient implementation. The company's products are compatible with industry-standard tool interfaces and data formats, and work with popular software tool sets from Avant! (Nasdaq:AVNT), Cadence (NYSE:CDN), and Synopsys (Nasdaq:SNPS).

SPC is headquartered at 3211 Scott Boulevard, Santa Clara, California, 95054, U.S.A. Telephone: [phone], Fax: [phone]. The SPC branch office for Japan and Asia is located at 3-17-6 Shin-Yokohama, Kouhoku-ku, Yokohama, Japan, and may be reached at 045-474-8970, Fax [phone].

Visit Silicon Perspective Corporation at www.SiPerspective.com for more information.

Silicon Perspective Corporation, First Encounter, Front-End Physical Design Environment, Amoeba, Fast-Track Database and In-Context are trademarks of Silicon Perspective Corporation. AMD, the AMD logo, SwitchIT and combinations thereof, are trademarks of Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.