Mentor Graphics Emulation Environment Becomes Standard at Alcatel in Canada and Europe.

Business Editors, High-Tech Writers

OTTAWA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Dec. 3, 2001

Mentor Graphics Corporation (Nasdaq:MENT) today announced that Alcatel Canada has adopted the Mentor Graphics(R) Celaro(TM) emulation environment for its Kanata, Ontario location for local and remote use by Alcatel sites worldwide.

After an extensive competitive evaluation period, Alcatel Canada selected Mentor's Celaro emulator to replace its existing emulation technology in order to handle Alcatel's current ASIC (application specific integrated circuit) design capacity of up to five million gates. Mentor's solution was chosen because it provides greater levels of productivity for local and remote design teams. In addition, Mentor's emulation environment enables remote access and capacity sharing, allowing Alcatel to maximize its resources between global sites.

The new Celaro system at Alcatel's Canada location, combined with the existing Celaro environment in Alcatel's Belgium site, creates a Celaro emulation farm available to Alcatel design teams around the world. Through Celaro's remote access capabilities, Alcatel's global design teams will gain access to this powerful verification resource for their most critical and strategic projects. In addition to its remote access capabilities, Celaro also enables sharing of a single system by multiple concurrent users, further optimizing productivity and return-on-investment.

Mentor Consulting has been a key partner for Alcatel since 1997 when the company first adopted emulation-based methodology in Europe. For the Canada site, Mentor worked closely with Alcatel to integrate Celaro into Alcatel's design verification methodologies and to set up a project-specific design verification environment for use on one of Alcatel's leading edge networking chipsets.

"Alcatel Canada selected Celaro emulation as the solution for system verification based on multiple factors, including Celaro's ability to handle both co-simulation and in-circuit verification, its valuable multi-user sharing and remote access features, and the opportunity it offered to align and enhance design environments and methodologies over many design centers in different locations," said Charlie Sabry, director of ASIC development, Alcatel Canada. "We anticipate that a Celaro-centric emulation farm will extend and multiply the productivity benefits to Alcatel design teams around the globe."

Established Success with Remote Emulation Methodology

Alcatel has used remote emulation with the Celaro emulator throughout its design centers in Europe for the past three years. The technology has been used collaboratively by remote design teams on multiple Alcatel projects, including xDSL, networking applications, optical transmission and satellite technologies. Centralized resources are used for accelerating ASIC validation and regression testing and for full system validation with the Celaro emulator that is connected to different target systems (in-circuit).

"Alcatel has been using Celaro in Europe in shared mode and remote access for securing project schedules, as well as quality product levels, among multiple design sites," said Rudi Dierckx, vice president, central engineering, broadband networking division, Alcatel. "Our use of Celaro in Europe was one of the factors that helped us get our ADSL products to market significantly ahead of the competition, enabling us to attain a leading market share position. The choice for investing in ASIC development capabilities after carefully evaluating the priorities within Alcatel, indicates the continued focus and dedication of Alcatel to maintain its leadership."

"The use of remote emulation enables Alcatel to share capacities and complete faster design iterations. These capabilities, in addition to Celaro's support for multiple asynchronous clocks, are essential in the development of complex telecom applications like Alcatel's," said Eric Selosse, general manager, Meta Systems division, Mentor Graphics.

Based on Mentor's unique "Custom Emulator on Silicon" (CEOS) architecture, the Celaro system is a leading custom emulation technology based on patented design debug capabilities, which are comparable to a software simulator, but orders of magnitude faster. With design compilation capabilities that exceed those of commercial FPGA-based emulators, and high design capacity, the Celaro emulator is the only system that has sufficient performance for today's complex System-on-Chip (SoC) designs. Celaro-based emulation methodology is part of Mentor Consulting's system verification services offering. Mentor Consulting is a provider of innovative solutions addressing today's design and verification challenges.

About Alcatel

Alcatel (NYSE:ALA) builds next generation networks, delivering integrated end-to-end voice and data networking solutions to established and new carriers, as well as enterprises and consumers worldwide. With sales of $29 billion (EURO 31 billion) in 2000 and 110,000 employees, Alcatel operates in more than 130 countries. For more information, visit Alcatel on the Internet: http://www.alcatel.com.

About Mentor Graphics

Mentor Graphics Corporation (Nasdaq:MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world's most successful electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of more than $600 million and employs approximately 3,000 people worldwide. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777; Silicon Valley headquarters are located at 1001 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, California 95131-2314. World Wide Web site: www.mentor.com.

Mentor Graphics is a registered trademark and Celaro is a trademark of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other company or product names are the registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners.