Cadence to Ship New Allegro and SPECCTRA Routing Enhancements With Full SPECCTRA Support for Mentor Board Station Users.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 23, 2000

New SPECCTRA Turbo-Stagger Technology Provides Major Performance Boost

Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN), the world's leading supplier of electronic design products and services, today announced major enhancements to its Allegro(R) PCB layout software and SPECCTRA(R) routing solution and full SPECCTRA product support for Mentor Board Station D1 users. The Allegro product enhancements include new interactive push/hug routing capabilities and the SPECCTRA router features Turbo-Stagger technology, which provides improved routing performance of up to 300% where differential pairs are a major design task and components with many rows of staggered pins exist.

The new version will start shipping to Cadence(R) customers in November and will increase productivity by providing printed circuit board (PCB) systems layout designers with the most powerful, integrated, interactive, and automatic interconnect routing solution for high-speed, ultra-dense designs.

"Whether you are a Cadence Allegro, Mentor Board Station, PADs Power PCB, or other host CAD user, this software release has something for everyone," said Keith Felton, director of product marketing for Cadence PCB Systems Division. "This announcement reaffirms Cadence's commitment to our customers and our longstanding leadership position in delivering the most powerful solutions for high-speed, constraint driven PCB design. As part of our `focusing on fundamentals' product strategy, we have been working on extensive upgrades to our Allegro layout software and SPECCTRA router product and are excited about these new capabilities and the big boost in productivity they provide. Furthermore, we are committed to providing our third party PCB tool users with the best and most industry-proven routing solution."

The product upgrade has proven extremely popular during beta testing. "As a beta site, we evaluated the new Allegro interactive routing and were impressed by many of the new features," said Mike Wright, senior PCB designer, SCI Systems, Inc. "We especially liked the ability to select between push/shove and hug/contour which is often critical for areas where interconnect flow patterns are important and the routing is dense. We feel these new features are a move in the right direction in continuing to make this tool easier to use and enabling the designer to be more productive."

New Allegro Software Routing Capabilities

-- IntelliUSE interactive etch editing -- provides real-time, shape-based, any
angle, push/shove routing, enabling the designer to choose between
"shove-preferred" and "hug-preferred" options. The real-time, embedded,
shape-based routing engine, optimizes the route by either pushing obstacles or
contour-following obstacles while dynamically jumping vias or component pins.
Custom, controllable, on-the-fly smoothing automatically tunes the route for
manufacturability during routing or route editing. Any interconnect that has
high-speed constraints provides the designer with a real-time, graphical
"heads-up" display that shows how much timing "slack" remains.

-- Routing optimization pre-checks -- enable the designer to save time by
analyzing the design prior to autorouting to highlight design rules or design
content that will negatively affect router performance. These checks prevent
the designer from wasting many hours in routing a design that has inherent
design setup defects.

New SPECCTRA Routing Solution Productivity Improvements

-- Turbo-Stagger technology -- provides optimal diagonal routing

which greatly improves router performance in designs with pins

and vias in staggered configuration or where a large

percentage of routes must pass through areas with staggered

pins and vias, such as ball grid arrays. Turbo-Stagger is very

effective on large, dense, multi-layer, high-speed designs.

-- Relative delay rules -- enable the designer to specify matched

timing constraints on nets or groups of nets that must match a

reference net or group of nets. Relative timing constraints

are prevalent on today's high-speed designs that contain a

large proportion of databuses.

-- Dynamic topology t-points -- enable the designer to optimize

routing efficiency and density while maintaining all topology

constraints. This is done automatically by the SPECCTRA

autorouter during the autorouting process.

-- Extended net rule support -- enables the designer to specify

an overall timing constraint on nets that pass through a

discrete device such as a termination resistor.

-- Full support for Mentor Board Station D1 release -- ensures

Mentor Graphics users continue to enjoy fully supported access

to Cadence's premier high-speed autorouting solution.

Price and Availability

Customers on maintenance will begin receiving their Allegro layout software and SPECCTRA router upgrades in November 2000. All products will support Solaris, HP-UX, IBM-AIX, Windows NT, and Windows 2000 platforms. In addition, the SPECCTRA router supports Windows 95 and Windows 98.

PCB design studio, a fully scalable solution, starts at $3,998 for a one year license, including maintenance, and is a complete PCB design solution that includes: Concept HDL or Capture CIS for schematic capture, library management, Allegro software for PCB layout, and SPECCTRA autorouting solution.

PCB design expert, for very complex, multi-layer, high-speed PCBs, starts at $26,000 for a one year license, including maintenance, and is a complete design solution that includes: Concept HDL or Capture CIS schematic capture, constraint and topology management, library management, Allegro expert software for timing driven PCB layout and SPECCTRA expert autorouting technology.

For more information on product pricing and availability, call 800/671-9505. For pricing and availability outside of North America, contact your local Cadence office or distributor.

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. The Cadence PCB Systems Division, a worldwide PCB EDA market leader, addresses the entire range of design needs in the PCB market, with complete tool suites available on Windows, Windows NT, and UNIX platforms. With approximately 5,100 employees and 1999 annual revenue of $1.1 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities located around the world. The company is headquartered in San Jose, 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, Allegro, and SPECCTRA are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.