Simplex Interconnect Verification Tools Combine With HP's 64-Bit Operating System to Give Chips Increased Speed and Capacity.

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 15, 1998--Hewlett-Packard Company and Simplex Solutions, Inc., today announced that Simplex has ported its interconnect verification tools to HP-UX 11, a 64-bit UNIX(R) system operating environment.

Simplex, a pioneer in the electronic design automation (EDA) market, provides software for full-chip extraction and analysis of deep submicron integrated-circuit designs. The company's Fire & Ice Version 1.2 and Thunder & Lightning Version 1.2, running on HP-UX 11, are currently available.

"Fire & Ice and Thunder & Lightning have enabled our customers to perform interconnect verification on designs with more than 15 million transistors," said Aki Fujimura, chief operating officer at Simplex. "The 64-bit capability of HP-UX leverages Simplex's scalable parallel architecture. This combination enables our customers to keep up with the continuous explosion in design sizes by avoiding the run-time bottleneck of a single processor."

"We are delighted to offer Simplex's advanced software technology on HP K- and V-Class Exemplar servers," said Roy Anderson, EDA market-development manager for HP's High Performance Systems Division. "The combination of HP's industry-leading hardware and Simplex's full-chip IC extraction and analysis software will provide design engineers with the advanced tools and technologies needed to achieve next-generation IC design."

Fire & Ice is a 3-D parasitic extraction product family for high-performance IC designs that provides overnight, full-chip, 3-D-accurate extraction for timing, IR drop, clock skew, signal integrity and electromigration analysis. Fire & Ice extracts the interconnect RC parasitics, transistors, discrete components and power grid for multimillion-transistor circuits in a matter of hours, providing the accuracy of 3-D field solvers with the speed of 2-D extraction techniques. Unlike other extraction products, Fire & Ice retains all of the separate capacitive components that are extracted, which enables accurate analysis of interconnect reliability due to electromigration and electrical overstress.

Thunder & Lightning is the new interconnect analysis standard for ultra-deep submicron (UDSM) integrated circuits, providing the most comprehensive power, clock and signal verification available. For process technologies below 0.35f, Thunder & Lightning is an analysis tool for digital high-performance IC designs that provides complete, full-chip analysis of dynamic and static IR drop, accurate clock skew, static filtering for signal integrity and electromigration risk assessment.

HP's Exemplar family includes HP 9000 K-Class and V-Class servers, which scale to 16 CPUs and 16GB RAM. This scalability, combined with HP's industry-leading PA-8200 PA-RISC(1) processor and 4MB of cache memory, makes HP Exemplar servers an ideal EDA platform. Both servers provide the performance, scalability, reliability and high availability IC designers need to complete electronic designs efficiently and reduce time to market for products.

ABOUT SIMPLEX

Simplex Solutions, Inc. is a pioneer in the new market for deep submicron full-chip interconnect verification. The company currently develops full-chip IC extraction and analysis software, used worldwide by companies developing microprocessors and integrated circuits (ICs) to improve chip performance and reliability. Simplex works closely with semiconductor foundries Chartered, IBM, NEC, TSMC, Toshiba and UMC to develop extraction models and validate extraction accuracy. The company's investors include Attractor Investment Management, Intel Corporation, Mayfield Fund, Sumitomo Corporation, and Worldview Technology Partners. Simplex can be reached at [phone] or on the web at http://www.simplex.com.

Simplex is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. Tel: [phone], Fax: [phone]. URL: http://www.simplex.com.

ABOUT HP

HP is the official information-technology hardware and maintenance supplier to the 1998 World Cup soccer tournament. Selected for its technology and skills to support and manage mission-critical applications, HP will help create an information-management infrastructure for handling game-scoring; media centers; personnel accreditation; hotel information; and various ticketing, stadium, warehouse and back-office operations.

Hewlett-Packard Company is a leading global provider of computing, Internet and intranet solutions, services, communications products and measurement solutions, all of which are recognized for excellence in quality and support. It is the second-largest computer supplier in the world, with computer-related revenue in excess of $35.4 billion in its 1997 fiscal year. HP has 125,300 employees and had revenue of $42.9 billion in its 1997 fiscal year.

Information about HP and its products can be found on the World Wide Web at http://www.hp.com.

(1) PA-RISC stands for Precision Architecture-reduced-instruction-set computing.

Note to Editors:

HP-UX Release 10.20 and later and HP-UX Release 11.00 and later (in both 32 and 64-bit configurations) on all HP 9000 computers are Open Group UNIX 95 branded products.

UNIX is a registered trademark of The Open Group.

CONTACT: Cunningham Communication, Inc. for HP

Rona Brodrick, 408/447-1665

[e-mail]

or

Simplex

Jan Willis, 408/617-6147

[e-mail]