Xilinx and Cadence Introduce SPECCTRAQuest Design Kit For Virtex-II Pro FPGAs

Design Kit Supports 3.125 Gb/s Multi-gigabit IO

SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 13, 2002--Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN - news) and Xilinx, Inc. (Nasdaq:XLNX - news) today announced the immediate availability of the new Rocket I/O(TM) Design Kit for SPECCTRAQuest(TM) for implementation of the new Xilinx® Virtex-II Pro(TM) high-speed FPGAs in printed circuit board (PCB) systems. The SPECCTRAQuest design kit is designed to help engineers shorten design cycles and reduce signal integrity problems when designing multi-gigabit serial Rocket I/O(TM) transceivers in the Virtex-II Pro FPGAs.

The design kit, a first of its kind for use with the Cadence SPECCTRAQuest Signal Integrity Expert environment, allows engineers to include both multi-gigabit transceiver (also known as serializer-desearializer or SERDES) silicon models and PCB databases in one simulation. This combination of correlated silicon-level encrypted models with a full-featured PCB simulation environment allows for the direct use of models already tested and correlated throughout the IC design process and the rapid implementation of Fibre Channel, Gigabit Ethernet, XAUI, Infiniband® and other interfaces into a system of FPGAs and PCBs.

"The new Rocket I/O Design Kit for SPECCTRAQuest allows engineers to become instantly productive in the challenging task of creating, implementing, and verifying gigahertz-speed links," said Rich Sevcik, senior vice president of FPGA Products at Xilinx. "The models in the kit have been pre-tested, verified, and correlated against reference waveforms in the SPECCTRAQuest environment, resulting in instant productivity with proven models."

"The new Xilinx Virtex-II Pro products make it possible for designers to integrate multi-gigabit transceivers into an FPGA. The SPECCTRAQuest design kit makes it easy to integrate an FPGA with gigabit per second IOs into a PCB system," said Jamie Metcalfe, vice president of strategic marketing for the Cadence PCB Systems Division. "This design kit helps address the growing silicon-package-board convergence issues hitting design teams as they cross the 1000 I/O and 250 MHz thresholds."

The announcement of the new design kit follows the March 11, 2002 announcement of a business alliance between Xilinx and Cadence® for development of system and board-level design solutions for Virtex-II(TM) series FPGAs, including the newly announced Virtex-II Pro family. The alliance will enable designers to more effectively utilize the enormous capacity and system performance of Xilinx FPGA.

Rocket I/O(TM) Design Kit for SPECCTRAQuest

• The SPECCTRAQuest Design Kit provides a proven approach to characterizing the interactions between Xilinx devices and the rest of the system.
• It contains pre-configured circuits ready to simulate for both typical chip-to-chip and backplane PCB interfaces. There's no time wasted hunting for models, testing and correlating them, or figuring out how to connect them.
• Models of the active Rocket I/O transceiver circuitry are encrypted transistor-level silicon models that have been correlated by Xilinx to match both the actual silicon design and empirical data, ensuring that system implementation is designed with the most advanced and accurate models available.
• Fully coupled frequency-dependent lossy package, PCB trace, via, and connector models allow users to carefully characterize the signal integrity and degradation issues that are inherent in this type of design.
• Pseudo-Random Bit Sequence (PRBS) stimulus patterns, degrees of pre-emphasis, jitter variations, eye diagrams, and other features required in multi-gigabit link design simulation are all available and designed to be easy-to-use.
• The SPECCTRAQuest simulation environment is graphical -- adapting the circuits for a unique application is as simple as `dragging and dropping.'

Price and Availability

The Rocket I/O(TM) Design Kits for SPECCTRAQuest are provided free to Xilinx customers who have the appropriate non-disclosure agreement. Visit http://support.xilinx.com/support/software/spice/spice-request.htm for more information.

SPECCTRAQuest Signal Integrity Expert starts at a U.S. list price of $24,200 for a one-year license. For pricing outside of North America, contact your local Cadence® office or distributor.

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 www.xilinx.com.

About Cadence

Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design automation products, methodology services, and design services.

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

     Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
     Meg Kenagy, 503/968-4842 (PCB Systems Division)
     mkenagy@cadence.com
        or
     Xilinx, Inc.
     Ann Duft, 408/879-4726
     publicrelations@xilinx.com