Incentia and Verplex Announce Agreements, Improve Tool Interoperability

Incentia joins Verplex's FormaLinks Program

Verplex Joins Incentia's EDACraft Program

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 20, 2002--Incentia Design Systems, Inc., an EDA company in the timing and synthesis market, announced today that it has joined Verplex's FormaLinks program and that Verplex has joined Incentia's EDACraft(TM) program. As a result of this partnership and these agreements, Incentia's logic and physical synthesis products, DesignCraft(TM) and DesignCraft Pro(TM), link seamlessly to Verplex's Conformal(TM) Logic Equivalence Checker (LEC) to improve tool interoperability.

"We are working with leading EDA companies like Verplex to improve tool interoperability and time to market for our customers," remarked Arthur Wei, Director of Product Marketing at Incentia. "Verplex's LEC is not only used extensively for our internal synthesis regression Q and A, but is also the equivalence checker we recommend to our customers. The integration of Verplex's LEC within our synthesis environment offers electronic designers a seamless connection and allows them to easily use one of the best solutions available for verification with our timing and synthesis tools."

"Designers are using new tools to handle increased complexity," said Bassilios Petrakis, Business Development Manager at Verplex. "By working with Incentia, we improve both the quality and speed of the overall design flow."

About the Link between Verplex's Conformal(TM) LEC and Incentia's Synthesis Tools

For the best quality results, Incentia's logic and physical synthesis tools perform advanced transformations, such as Arithmetic Reduction and Transformation (ART), Sequential Pipeline and Retime (SPR), clock gating, and scan cell optimization and chaining. All these transformations can be verified by Verplex's LEC. To facilitate the verification process, a menu bar exists within Incentia's GUI environment so users can invoke Verplex's LEC directly. This smooth interface shortens the design cycle between synthesis and verification.

About Incentia's Timing and Synthesis Software Products

Incentia offers timing and logic and physical synthesis software -TimeCraft(TM), DesignCraft(TM) and DesignCraft Pro(TM). TimeCraft is a full-chip, gate-level static timing analyzer, with fast analysis speed and comprehensive features. DesignCraft is a logic synthesis tool with data-path, test and low power synthesis. DesignCraft Pro, for physical synthesis, works with designs represented at the RT-level to detailed placement level. It improves timing closure, performance, capacity and turnaround time for nanometer designs.

About Incentia's EDACraft Program

Incentia's EDACraft program targets EDA tool providers. Incentia's partners work with Incentia to integrate their tools with Incentia's timing and synthesis tools to improve the electronic design flow.

About Verplex's FormaLinks Program

Through the FormaLinks program, Verplex works with other EDA tool vendors, IP providers, semiconductor foundries, and ASIC library vendors to provide mutual customers with solutions that accelerate the functional design verification of integrated circuit design. For information about joining Verplex's FormaLinks partnership program, please contact Bassilios Petrakis at (408) 586-0362 or send email to formalinks@verplex.com.

About Verplex's Conformal Logic Equivalence Checker (LEC)

The Conformal(TM) LEC consistently achieves superior speed, capacity, usability, and versatility for full chip designs. It compares RTL to flattened netlist for multi-million gate designs in minutes or hours instead of the days or weeks required by comparable tools. Equally important, it is far easier to setup and control, plus it provides a smooth, painless graphical debug environment. Finally, Conformal LEC has a wide range of support for traditionally difficult verification problems such as multipliers and pipeline retiming.

About Verplex

Verplex Systems Inc. is an EDA company focusing on delivery of the highest speed, highest capacity and easiest to use formal verification products for complex SoC design. Founded in 1997, it is privately held and funded by leading venture capital firms. Corporate headquarters is located at 300 Montague Expressway, Suite 100, Milpitas, Calif. 95035. Telephone: (408) 586-0300. Facsimile: (408) 586-0230. Email: info@verplex.com. Online information is found at its Web Site: http://www.verplex.com.

About Incentia

Incentia Design Systems, Inc., an EDA company, addresses deep submicron timing and synthesis for multi-million-gate SoC designs with stringent performance, area and power requirements. For more information visit, www.incentia.com, email info@incentia.com or call 408-727-8988. The company is headquartered at 4633 Old Ironsides Dr, Suite 200, Santa Clara, CA 95054.

Notes to Editors:

Acronyms

ASIC:    Application Specific IC
EDA:     Electronic Design Automation
GUI:     Graphic User Interface
Q and A: Quality and Assurance
IC:      Integrated Circuit
LEC:     Logic Equivalency Checker
RTL:     Register Transfer Level
SoC:     System-on-Chip

DesignCraft and DesignCraft Pro, EDACraft and TimeCraft are trademarks of Incentia Design Systems, Inc. Verplex and FormalLinks are trademarks of Verplex Systems Inc. All other companies and products referenced herein are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

     ValleyPR for Incentia
     Georgia Marszalek, 650/345-7477
     Georgia@ValleyPR.com
           or
     Verplex
     Nanette Collins, 617/437-1822 (Public Relations Counsel)
     nanette@nvc.com