Avant! and Anagram Sign Definitive Agreement; Merger on Track to Close in September.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 19, 1996--Avant! Corporation and Anagram Inc., which four days ago announced the signing of a binding letter of intent to merge the two companies, today announced the signing of a definitive agreement to merge.

The transaction, which Avant! intends to account for as a pooling of interests, is expected to close in September, 1996. Under the terms of the merger agreement, Avant! will issue approximately 2,414,000 shares of Avant! common stock in exchange for all of Anagram's equity securities. The closing of the merger is subject to regulatory and Anagram stockholder approval, the availability of pooling-of-interests accounting treatment, and certain other customary closing conditions.

"Customers will benefit from our combined strengths," said Gerald C. Hsu, chairman, president and CEO of Avant!. "We offer a much more complete ICDA flow now -- from place and route, through RC extraction, circuit simulation, timing and power analysis, to verification. We intend to continue our technology expansion to provide a fully integrated ICDA methodology and environment to our customers."

Hsu continued, "In addition, Anagram's technology can be distributed to a much wider and deeper customer base through our 18 field offices and approximately 200 highly productive sales and support people worldwide."

Ed Cheng, Anagram president and CEO, said, "ADM provides both the accuracy and ease of use expected by today's SPICE users, and its unique algorithms tackle chip-level problems such as power analysis, clock skews, and mixed-signal analysis. Our mutual customers have already been using Anagram's analysis with Avant!'s advanced RC extraction."

Customers Benefit from ADM

"The design engineers in my team are very pleased with ADM's ability to simulate large blocks consisting of mixed analog and digital circuits with many feedback loops, several times faster than other packages using SPICE or its derivatives," said Vijay Nair, design engineering manager at Advanced Micro Devices' Communications Products Division.

John Z. Zhang, senior design manger in the analog engineering department at Cirrus Logic, said, "Our group produces mixed-signal designs that emphasize high circuit speeds running within very complicated blocks in a closed loop. We tried a leading switch-level simulator solution, but it was not accurate enough for our requirements. SPICE was too slow ... we needed a better solution and discovered ADM. ADM runs the same SPICE netlist in less than a day while maintaining similar accuracy, allowing us to do many iterations in dramatically reduced time."

"Anagram's ADM is a great product," said Eric Ruetz, design manger at S3. "It is fast and accurate, and provides a unique capability for our mixed-signal designs. Anagram provided all the support we needed to ensure that the product solved some of our unusual design requirements."

"On our R10000 project, ADM enabled us to simulate large, complex circuits for many cycles at each of the possible operating modes over all the process corners," said Hai Nguyen, member of the technical staff of Silicon Graphics, Inc.'s MIPS Division. "The time required to simulate with SPICE is just too large to run all the possible cases and still meet the schedule."

About Anagram

Anagram delivers easy-to-use, high-capacity circuit simulation and high-accuracy timing analysis software for deep submicron processor, graphics, memory, communications and mixed-signal ICs. Key customers include AMD, Cirrus Logic, Fujitsu, Hyundai, LG Semicon, Matsushita, Micron, Mitsubishi, Motorola, National, NEC, Oki, S3, Samsung, SGS-Thomson, Silicon Graphics, Sun Microsystems, Toshiba, TSMC and UMC. Company headquarters are in Sunnyvale, Calif., telephone [phone]. Anagram's web site is at www.anagraminc.com.

About Avant!

Avant! Corporation develops, markets, and supports integrated circuit design automation (ICDA) software for deep submicron ICs, microprocessors, microcontrollers, application-specific standard products (ASSPs) and complex application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs). The Company's products are used for the design and production of high-performance ICs at more than 160 customer sites around the world. Company headquarters are in Sunnyvale, Calif., telephone [phone]. Web site: www.avanticorp.com.

CONTACT: Avant! Corporation

Lois DuBois, 408/523-8857 or 408/738-8881