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LAS VEGAS--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 18, 2001--Ray Bingham, president and CEO of Cadence Design Systems, Inc, today defined the company's long-term industry vision, including the need for full cooperation from electronics industry supply chain and design chain companies to solve the next-generation design challenges. The Cadence® vision involves combining design technology, services capability and partnerships across the design chain to provide a design infrastructure that enables collaborative product development. During a press and analyst briefing at the 38th annual Design Automation Conference (DAC), Bingham noted that in addition to rapid technology advancement, the industry disagreggation trend is driving significant changes in the business of electronic design.

``Our customers' businesses are changing rapidly as they take advantage of new technology to get ever more powerful electronic products to market under more intense time-to-market pressures,'' stated Bingham. ``To accomplish that they require a new electronic design infrastructure that keeps pace with technology and facilitates sharing of intellectual property across the growing number of participants in the electronics design chain.''

The Cadence Vision

Cadence outlined its vision to create a next generation design infrastructure to deal with the increasing complexity of design and to form industry-wide partnerships, both targeted at helping customers streamline their design chains, resulting in getting more competitive products in the market faster. A key requirement of Bingham's vision includes bringing together design technologies that have historically been distinct design domains -- a vision Bingham termed ``design convergence.'' More specifically, bringing together hardware and software design, analog and digital design and silicon, package and board design.

New Industry Focus Needed

``Shrinking semiconductor process geometries and a dramatic rise in complexity are impacting every aspect of electronic design,'' said Bingham. ``Historically, the industry has been focused on improved performance of individual point tools, that alone will not solve today's generation of design challenges. Our customers need integrated solutions, and they need to ensure that those solutions facilitate collaboration across the design chain. No single company can solve the entire spectrum of design challenges that the industry faces. Cooperation within the electronic design industry and across other industries such as manufacturing and software design are critically important.''

Today, many electronics companies are focusing on trying to optimize their supply chains to reduce cost and get their developed products to the market faster. During electronic product design and development, collaboration must occur across a number of design and manufacturing partners, or the design chain. Many companies are looking to streamline their design chain to allow them to develop more competitive products and speed the time from concept through to being ready to enter the supply chain, and ultimately the market. With market windows shrinking and product development complexity increasing, design chain optimization has a significant business impact.

Cadence Vision Being Realized

To facilitate the creation of a new industry-wide design infrastructure, Cadence announced today that it will contribute its advanced Genesis database technology to an electronics industry-wide community, OpenAccess (related press release available at www.cadence.com). This collaboration will significantly reduce interoperability barriers, allow electronics companies to directly contribute to future enhancements and add proprietary extensions, and provide the performance, capacity and functionality to address today's electronic design challenges. Founding members of the OpenAccess Community include Agere Systems, Cadence Design Systems, Hewlett-Packard, IBM, Intel, LSI Logic, Mentor Graphics, Motorola, Si2, Simplex and STMicroelectronics.

``This is what customers want. They have been asking for true interoperability,'' said Bingham. ``The infrastructure is a critical step toward design domain convergence in that it will contain the design data for entire integrated circuits (ICs), instead of just the digital or analog portions that proprietary databases contain today.''

Design Domains Start to Converge

The electronics industry design domains are considered separate worlds, which create major bottlenecks in the design process, limiting time-to-market, functionality, and price/performance. Cadence described the three major design domain convergence areas, provided evidence from third-party sources that demonstrates the extent of the problem in each, and outlined the industries within the design chain that must work together toward solutions. More specifically:

    Hardware-Software Convergence -- The distinction between hardware
    and software is blurring. Today's complex ICs contain more
    software than hardware content, and the relative amount of
    software is growing rapidly. IC providers and their system
    customers face serious hardware-software challenges including IC
    platform strategies, cross-industry co-development, and protecting
    massive software investments. While Cadence and others have tools
    that help in hardware-software co-development, no one has
    completely addressed this need. Cadence Virtual Component
    Co-Design is an example of a technology to enable platform-based
    hardware-software design. Closer partnerships with the software
    design industry are important to the solution.

Digital-Analog Convergence -- The pervasiveness of communications

in electronics devices is driving the analog circuitry needed for

communication interfaces onto an increasing number of ICs. In

fact, the percentage of mixed-signal ICs (i.e., those that contain

digital and analog circuitry) is expected to rise from

approximately 20% today to nearly 70% in the next 5 years.

Historically, analog ICs and digital ICs have had entirely

different ecosystems and development environments. These need to

converge into coherent design chains that tackle such problems as

integration challenges (e.g., packaging, flexibility, and noise),

new top-down mixed-signal design environments, and silicon issues

    Silicon-Package-Board Convergence -- Until recently, most ICs used
    standard package designs. With today's system performance
    requirements and >1000-pin-count ICs, custom packaging (e.g.,
    flip-chip) is becoming the new standard. Cadence provides the
    market-leading IC packaging solution today. However, the real
    challenge is that in order to keep up with performance and
    integration demands, the silicon, package, and printed circuit
    board will have to be designed together even though they will be
    designed by a number of companies across a design chain. This will
    require a new level of cooperation and overcoming numerous
    technical hurdles. Cadence SPECCTRAQuest is helping customers deal
    with high-speed interconnect issues from the silicon through the
    package to the board.

     Cadence Design Systems, Inc., San Jose
     Jim Christensen, 408/944-7684
     jimchristensen@cadence.com