Cadence Introduces the First Unified Synthesis/Place-and-Route System.

Business Editors/Technology Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2000

System Features First Physical Synthesis Tool with Global Routing and

First Optimization Place-and-Route Tool with PKS Technology

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN), the world's leading supplier of electronic design products and services, today announced Cadence(R) SP&R, a unified synthesis/place-and-route system for high-performance integrated circuit (IC) designs. The SP&R system supports design flows from register-transfer-level (RTL) or gates to tapeout (GDSII). Cadence is the first company to offer a system that includes both physical synthesis and optimization place-and-route tools. Both tools feature Cadence PKS technology and use common synthesis, placement, routing, and timing engines ensuring unparalleled quality of results and predictability.

Cadence SP&R consists of a new version of the Ambit(R) PKS physical synthesis tool that uses the Silicon Ensemble(tm) router to perform actual global routing and a Silicon Ensemble place-and-route tool that integrates Ambit PKS physical synthesis. The Cadence SP&R flow solves circuit timing problems associated with conventional synthesis and place-and-route by addressing physical effects during synthesis and performs sophisticated logic transformations during place-and-route. The tools use common engines ensuring perfect correlation and eliminating any design discrepancies due to tool differences.

Ambit PKS Physical Synthesis Adds Global Routing

Many high-performance designs contain complex routing obstructions that make it impossible to predict final timing accurately without global routing. The latest release of Ambit PKS physical synthesis solves this problem by integrating the Silicon Ensemble Wroute router into the tool. The tool now optimizes the design's logic and placement along with the actual global routing. Ambit PKS outputs a database with placement and global routing information. Reading the global routing information directly into Silicon Ensemble PKS place-and-route eliminates the highly error-prone step of passing design constraints. The net result is a higher-performance design and a more predictable flow.

EmpowerTel Networks, a leading supplier of switching solutions, used PKS with Silicon Ensemble on a critical system-on-chip for its USX1000 VoIP switch. The switch, a unique services platform for next-generation communication service providers, was on a tight deadline to meet schedule. "With PKS, we eliminated design iterations and got higher-performance results in a much shorter time," said Jayan Ramankutty, EmpowerTel's vice president, corporate engineering. "Adding routing to PKS and PKS to Silicon Ensemble will allow us to achieve correlation across tools and continue meeting our aggressive performance goals."

Cadence Introduces Silicon Ensemble PKS

Optimization-Place-and-Route

As part of today's announcement, Cadence is adding its physical synthesis technology to Silicon Ensemble with signal integrity to form a new product called Silicon Ensemble PKS (SE-PKS).

SE-PKS uses Cadence PKS technology to completely restructure gate-level netlists produced by conventional wireload model-based synthesis. It can also directly read Ambit PKS databases that contain placement and actual global routing information, making it the only place-and-route tool that can accept forward-annotated global routing.

SE-PKS is a comprehensive place and route tool that incorporates enhanced industry-standard constraint support, which makes it much easier to move designs from conventional synthesis into place-and-route and easier to adopt a timing-driven design flow.

Its powerful PKS optimizations are critical throughout physical implementation, including after refining physical design constraints, adding clock trees, or changing the power grid. Without the Ambit PKS technology in place-and-route, such changes result in reduced design performance, increased design area and expensive iterations back to the logical design team. With the tool's built-in signal integrity features, design teams can automatically prevent and correct crosstalk and IR drop problems. Once implementation is complete, teams can use the built-in extraction and signoff-quality static timing analyzer to verify the final results.

Perfect Front-to-Back Correlation

Ambit PKS and SE-PKS use the same synthesis, placement, routing, and timing engines, making Cadence SP&R the only flow in the industry with perfect front-to-back correlation. This is critical because any variance between synthesis and place-and-route reduces predictability and quality-of-results. Without perfect correlation, front-end and back-end teams get different timing results, have different logic and placement optimization results, and use different routing information. Cadence SP&R eliminates all of these problems by guaranteeing that both tools produce identical results. The net result is much higher predictability.

"The Cadence SP&R sets a new standard for physical synthesis, optimization place-and-route, and the overall flow," said Paul Estrada, corporate vice president of product marketing at Cadence. "Only Cadence has the synthesis technology, place-and-route technology, and design expertise to provide such a comprehensive system. SP&R will provide the unparalleled predictability and quality-of-results the market has been desperately looking for."

Price and Availability

Full production shipments of the new version Ambit PKS and SE-PKS begin in April, 2000. For Ambit PKS one-year U.S. list price starts at $100,000 and for SE-PKS one-year list price starts at $400,000. Both products are available on UNIX-based workstations from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. For information on international pricing, please contact the local Cadence sales office.

About Cadence

Cadence is the largest supplier of software 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 around the world. The Company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. More information about the company, its products and services may be obtained from the World Wide Web at http://www.cadence.com.

Cadence and the Cadence logo are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. Ambit and Silicon Ensemble are trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All others are properties of their holders.