Cadence Ships New Release of Envisia Ambit Synthesis.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 7, 1999--

Distributed Synthesis and STA Sign-off Features Attack

Design Productivity and Predictability Challenges of Deep

Sub-micron Chip Design

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN), the world's leading supplier of electronic design products and services, today announced production availability of a new release of its Envisia(TM) Ambit(R) synthesis software that improves execution speeds for large chip designs by a factor of three to five times and delivers sign-off quality timing results.

Envisia Ambit synthesis now provides built-in, automated distributed synthesis capabilities for leveraging networked compute environments to dramatically reduce synthesis run times for multi-million gate designs. The product's integrated high-capacity timing tool is also enhanced with sign-off features currently being tested for approval by several application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) vendors. Graphical user interface refinements particularly focused on design analysis functions resulted in substantial performance improvements for histogram and schematic based analysis.

Design Productivity Enhanced with Distributed Synthesis

Distributed synthesis is an integral part of the Envisia Ambit synthesis product making its operations transparent to users. It was designed with ease-of-use and designer productivity in mind. There are no scripts to install, no special files to create. Just one command, and Envisia Ambit synthesis deploys distributed algorithms to deliver high quality results faster.

After reading in the design and its timing constraints, designers simply "turn on" the distributed synthesis option instead of the default non-distributed. Unlike conventional synthesis executing on a single machine (non-distributed), distributed synthesis partitions the synthesis task into smaller jobs that can be executed in parallel across multiple machines while retaining the logical hierarchy of the design.

The tool has a built-in queuing and load balancing mechanism to efficiently distribute the jobs across available machine resources. Design partitioning, job management, and design re-assembly are completely automatic, and require no user intervention. The results of the distributed synthesis are reported in the same, user-friendly format designers are accustomed to with the non-distributed operations of Envisia Ambit synthesis.

The distributed synthesis feature does not require customers to purchase a special license and can operate across a heterogeneous mix of supported UNIX platforms. The tool also supports job management using LSF software from Platform Computing Corporation.

"In the past, designers have been burdened with development and maintenance of complicated scripting and budgeting environments for synthesis," said Ketan Joshi, synthesis product marketing manager at Cadence. "Distributed synthesis eliminates the need for this cumbersome task and lets the design teams focus on functionality."

"Many of our customers are planning on chips in excess of five million gates. The superior performance and capacity of Envisia Ambit synthesis, coupled with our highly automated distributed synthesis feature, allows customers to easily manage the synthesis for such large designs," added Joshi.

Design Predictability Improved with Sign-off Quality Static

Timing Analysis

The latest release of Envisia Ambit synthesis adds several new features to its integrated high capacity, high performance static timing analyzer. These include constant propagation during timing analysis, common path pessimism removal (CPPR), as well as additional timing checks. Designers using Envisia Ambit synthesis can achieve greater design productivity and predictability through its integrated approach to synthesis and static timing analysis (STA). This is especially significant when contrasted to other synthesis tools that force designers to rely on separate STA tools, requiring them to continually feed information back and forth between the synthesis and timing tools.

Pricing & Availability

The new release of the Envisia Ambit synthesis software is immediately available for UNIX-based workstations from Sun Microsystems and Hewlett-Packard. It is U.S. list priced at $25,000, based on new pricing introduced today by Cadence. (Reference Sept. 7, 1999 announcement, Cadence Leads Transition to Physically Knowledgeable Synthesis with Bold Product and Pricing Strategy, found at http://www.cadence.com/press_box/). For information on international pricing, please contact the local Cadence sales office.

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 more than 4,000 employees and 1998 annual sales of $1.2 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.

Note to Editors: Cadence, the Cadence logo, and Ambit are registered trademarks, and Envisia is a trademark of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All others are properties of their holders.