Cadence and Xilinx Form Strategic Alliance to Provide Best-In-Class Development Tools for Advanced FPGAs

Market Leaders to Demonstrate Advanced Design Environments for Virtex-II Pro Platform FPGAs at Programmable World 2002

SAN JOSE, Calif., March 11 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE: CDN - news) and Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq: XLNX - news) today announced a multi-faceted alliance for developing system and board-level design solutions for Xilinx® Virtex-II(TM) series FPGAs, including the newly announced Virtex-II Pro(TM) FPGA family. The alliance will enable designers to more effectively utilize the enormous capacity and system performance of Xilinx FPGAs, while working at higher levels of abstraction throughout the functional design flow. In addition, Cadence customers will now be able to readily retarget their designs with equal access to both FPGAs and ASICs.

"Cadence and Xilinx recognize a unique opportunity to leverage combined resources to serve existing customer needs while opening new market opportunities as the FPGA and ASIC markets converge," said Mike Bosworth, executive vice president and general manager, Cadence Systems Solutions Business. "The FPGA flows will be used by our customers for both ASIC/ASSP hardware/software prototyping and for full production where appropriate. Partnering with the world leader in programmable logic assures our customers of receiving best-in-class FPGA solutions."

In the short term, the alliance will provide an efficient path to Virtex-II FPGAs for DSP system designers through the integration of the Cadence Signal Processing Worksystem (SPW) with Xilinx Coregen FPGA optimized cores. It will also enable Xilinx customers to perform advanced, transaction-level verification through market-leading Cadence NC-Sim simulators. Xilinx will make available SPECCTRAQuest high-speed design kits supporting the new 3.125 Gb/s IO technology in the Virtex-II Pro FPGAs. The kits have been verified against reference waveforms using Cadence SPECCTRAQuest(TM) SI Expert software -- an integrated solution for high-speed PCB design and analysis.

"We view Cadence as an ideal partner because of its large market share in system-level design and DSP ASIC design, its leadership in functional verification, and its high-speed PCB design with over 50,000 relevant seats," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president of FPGA Products at Xilinx. "Virtex-II Pro designers need a new generation of easy-to-use platform configuration environments, system-level modeling, and hardware/software co-development tools to optimize their design and evaluation processes. The integration of Coregen with SPW, the availability of high-speed SPECCTRAQuest design kits, and the certification of the Cadence NC-Sim simulators provide designers the methodology and tools to handle the next-generation issues of performance, capacity, and general complexity."

This year the companies will also begin strategic collaboration on advanced design concepts and technologies to accelerate a designer's ability to conceptualize and implement a design across the FPGA fabric and PowerPC-based software. Both companies have agreed to provide equal investments in R&D, design kit creation, ongoing support, application engineering, software access and maintenance, project and program management, marketing, and collaborative sales. The intent is to tailor Cadence system- level design and verification solutions to the needs of both Cadence and Xilinx users; to boost the adoption rate for Xilinx FPGA verification and implementation over what is possible today; and to collaborate on advanced system-level design technologies and methodologies to prepare for the next generation of multi-processor FPGAs.

About Xilinx

Xilinx is the leading innovator of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as cores, and unparalleled field engineering support. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today. Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, high-reliability/military, and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx web site at http://www.xilinx.com/.

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. With approximately 5,700 employees and 2001 revenues of approximately $1.43 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities around the world. The Company is headquartered in San Jose, Calif. and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. More information about the company, its products and services is available at http://www.cadence.com.

NOTE: Cadence and the Cadence logo are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. SPECCTRAQuest is a trademark of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are property of their respective holders.