The New Summit Rises

Boston, Mass. - May 27, 2002 - Summit Design, Inc., the pioneering innovator of high-level design automation (HLDA) and electronic system-level (ESL) design tools and methodologies, today announced resumption of full business operations as an independent electronic design automation (EDA) company. The new Summit Design, formerly the SLD business unit of Innoveda, is supported by substantial financial resources, a significant worldwide customer base, and an established and innovative product line.

Guy Moshe, a founder of the original Summit Design, returns as president and CEO to lead a senior management team with more than 60 years of combined EDA experience. The company has a world-class engineering and R&D organization and will maintain and expand its worldwide sales, marketing, and distribution channels.

"Summit helped create and lead the HLDA market in 1994 with its graphical HDL entry tool, but a true leader has yet to emerge in the ESL market," said Moshe. "We have regained independent status to better serve our customers and meet the demands of a rapidly evolving marketplace. Our immediate priority is to enhance support for our current RTL customers while forging ahead in the ESL market space to solve the difficult problems of system and hardware/software co-design."

"As an organization, Summit is committed to driving design abstraction and productivity up to new levels to deal with the exponential increase in the complexity of electronic systems and products. Our commitment will allow our worldwide customer base to keep pace with the increasing demands of their markets and derive superior return on investment from Summit products. We will leverage our strong existing customer base to maintain and expand our position as a leading innovator in the EDA market."

Summit Design's RTL and ESL products include Visual Elite (VE), HDLScore, Visual IP, VE System Design, VE System Architect, Virtual-CPU, and Virtual Prototype. These products comprise a complete solution that spans the full range of design issues from system-level to RTL code. The Summit product set provides an environment based on industry-standard languages that supports multiple abstraction levels and design domains. These products offer a bridge between HDL and C-based designs to increase design verification productivity by an order of magnitude for hardware/software-based systems.

Summit's ESL Strategy
ESL is the design domain that will address the functionality (complexity) and validation (performance) challenges of the sophisticated electronic systems that form the core of customers' design challenges. Summit's strategy is to focus on the ESL design domain and its primary vehicle for addressing the task is the 'C' language. 'C' provides the necessary abstraction, market acceptance and performance to carry the ESL methodology forward. The widespread use and acceptance of C/C++ in various phases of the design flow by the design community and EDA industry make 'C' the obvious choice.

Emerging standards such as SystemC are an important milestone in working toward an ESL methodology that will allow designers to cope with the increasing complexity of electronic designs as product cycles shorten. Several companies, including Summit, are developing class libraries beyond the basic language set in order to provide additional design and analysis methods, but these extensions will remain a part of the standard.

Summit plans to continue strengthening its HLDA and RTL tools. HDL alone cannot support the same level of capabilities as SystemC where ESL methodology is concerned, but HDL is an established language for hardware design and will remain so into the future, serving an important segment of the EDA market.

In today's systems market, hardware is becoming more of a platform (performance) to execute the software (functionality). As system designers embrace both hardware and software, it is clear C/C++ will be their ultimate choice for design automation. Summit's strategy is based on the necessity to tightly link ESL and RTL methodologies to make specification and implementation a seamless process.

For more information, visit www.sd.com.

About Summit Design
Summit Design is a leading international supplier of software products that address engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation phases of complex hardware/software systems. The company is privately held with primary investment from Divestiture Growth Capital, a leading technology investment fund dedicated to buying, financing, and growing information technology divestitures. The world's top electronics companies use Summit Design's products to increase engineering productivity, shorten time to market, and improve product quality. Summit Design is headquartered in Boston, Mass. with offices in Europe and Israel.

For more information, contact:

Rami Rachamim
Summit Design
+972-9-9708703
rami@sd.com

Lou Covey
VitalCom
(650) 637-8212 x 202
lou@vitalcompr.com