Summit Design's Award Winning Vista IDE Enhances Its SystemC Debugging Capabilities With IEEE 1666 and Windows Platform Support; Vista 2006.1 Provides Easier Integration With Third-Party Tools and SystemC Design Environments.

LOS ALTOS, Calif. -- Summit Design, Inc., a leading provider of electronic system-level (ESL) and hardware description language (HDL) design solutions, today announced important enhancements to its award winning Vista(TM) integrated design environment (IDE) for SystemC. Vista 2006.1 adds support for IEEE 1666, the standard for SystemC from the Open SystemC Initiative (OSCI), and extends platform support to include the Microsoft(R) Windows(R) operating system (OS). Vista 2006.1 also provides easier integration with third-party tools and SystemC design environments.

"Vista's SystemC design, debug, and verification environment provides powerful capabilities with a consistent interface across multiple design environments and tools," said Emil Girczyc, president and CEO of Summit Design, Inc. "By supporting the IEEE 1666 standard, while maintaining support for SystemC 2.0.1, 2.1, and 2.1V1, our customers can count on Vista's debugging capabilities regardless of the version of the SystemC being used."

By adding timely support for the new IEEE 1666 standard, utilizing the SystemC open source proof-of-concept library announced today by OSCI, Summit is aiding in the adoption and proliferation of new ESL standards. Summit simplifies integration of IP from various sources by providing support for multiple versions of SystemC, such as IEEE 1666 and SystemC 2.1, and reduces the integration effort design teams typically need to undertake.

Vista 2006.1 increases the ease of integration with existing tool flows and infrastructures. With support for third-party lint and synthesis tools already in place, the new interfaces in Vista 2006.1 expand support to include several major commercial simulation environments, allowing designers to use Vista's best-in-class debugging capabilities with a range of simulators.

Vista 2006.1 also gives designers the option of integrating into an Eclipse-based design environment, or to continue to use Vista's IDE project features stand alone. The Eclipse platform is an open-source development environment that provides a common framework for integration and management of software tools from multiple vendors. The optional integration permitted by Vista 2006.1 enables customers to use Vista for SystemC debug and simulation while remaining in their Eclipse environment for source control and editing.

"Customers requested this integration so that they could use Vista's debugging capabilities in the environment of their choice," continued Girczyc. "Summit recognizes the value of supporting standards and integrating with the best solutions from multiple sources. Vista is designed to easily integrate with other technologies. The additional capabilities in Vista 2006.1 increase Summit's support of standards and open-source solutions for SystemC design."

Other additions to Vista's debugging capabilities include enhanced transaction-level model (TLM) viewing with a transaction sequence viewer and improved support for local variable tracing in Vista's waveform and process status window.

Availability

Vista 2006.1 is currently available to select Beta customers, while the production version will be available in Q3 of 2006. Vista 2006.1 includes TLM support, the Eclipse interface, and Windows support, and will be provided to all current Vista customers. Vista is currently offered on the Linux and Solaris platforms.

Third-party simulation interface options are in use today at a number of beta-site locations world wide. These interfaces will be available in production to all customers in Q3. These interface options are not required for use with the OSCI proof of concept SystemC simulator.

Demonstrations of Vista will be provided on July 24-27, 2006, in Summit Design's booth #1028 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) located within the Moscone Convention Center in San Francisco, California.

To learn more about Summit's support for IEEE 1666 and the new capabilities in this version of the standard, register to attend the mini-seminar hosted jointly by Doulos and Summit Design, "New features of IEEE 1666/SystemC 2.2". The mini-seminar is being held at the Moscone Convention Center, in booth #1028 on Tuesday, July 25, 11:00 - 12:00 p.m. Registration is available at http://www.sd.com/news_events/events.

About Summit's Vista IDE

Vista(TM) is an integrated design environment (IDE) for SystemC that combines both hardware and software concepts to speed design and debug of SystemC applications. In June of 2006, Vista was awarded the prestigious Semiconductor Industry News' LSI of the Year Award in the Design Environment/Development Tools category. Easy to adopt, Vista builds upon the industry standard gnu tools. Its unique data introspection, design exploration and unique debugging features enable more rapid understanding of designs and speed the verification process. Vista also offers advanced coding facilities, browsers, and a verification toolset targeted for high-level SystemC transaction-level modeling (TLM). Vista's SystemC Transaction Sequence Viewer(TM) (TSV) supports effective debug of designs written at the transaction-level, with no set-up required. The TSV enables designers to automatically view and debug complex communication protocols and system-level interfaces between blocks. While other SystemC design environments require time-consuming manual code instrumentation, Vista's TSV automatically captures the interface method calling sequence and presents the communication protocol transactions in an intuitive tabular format. The unique debugging capabilities in Vista are possible because of its built-in SystemC awareness and its in-depth understanding of SystemC designs.

About Summit

Summit Design's industry-leading ESL and HDL solutions enable SOC companies to deliver products that meet system-level performance and power targets with dramatically reduced schedule risk. Summit's products address engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation design phases of complex hardware/software systems. Panorama(TM) allows designers to perform real-time application emulation of both the hardware and software portions of an embedded SoC, before core and IP selections are finalized. Vista(TM) is an integrated development environment (IDE) for SystemC that combines both hardware and software concepts to speed design and debug of SystemC and TLM applications. Visual Elite(TM) is a state-of-the-art design, integration and verification platform which enables designers to intuitively capture and validate their designs using high-level design techniques and languages. Top electronics companies worldwide, including leaders in the wireless, automotive, and consumer electronics space, have achieved dramatic reductions in design cycle time through their use of Summit's products. Summit Design is headquartered in Los Altos, California, with offices throughout the US, Europe, Japan, Israel, and ROA. To learn more, please visit http://www.sd.com.

All trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned in this news release are the intellectual property of their respective owners.