Industry Leaders Select Cadence Incisive Verification; ARM and NVIDIA to Reduce Total Verification Time

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--May 22, 2003--Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN) today announced that leading-edge technology companies, including ARM and NVIDIA Corporation, have selected the new Cadence(R) Incisive(TM) verification platform for their nanometer-scale ICs. The platform provides up to 100 times more full-chip performance than RTL simulation and compresses overall verification time up to 50 percent.

"Customers are responding to the clear value proposition that Incisive offers," said Lavi Lev, executive vice president and general manager, Products and Solutions, at Cadence. "Our unified verification approach provides the speed and efficiency advanced SoC and ASIC design teams have been asking us for. Seven companies chose the Incisive platform in the first quarter of the platform's introduction."

NVIDIA Corporation (Nasdaq:NVDA) of Santa Clara, Calif., a market leader in graphics chips and one of the largest fabless semiconductor companies, will be using the Cadence Incisive verification platform to verify its next-generation 3D graphics processor.

"Incisive simulation and acceleration/emulation is a great addition to our verification tool suite for verifying our multi-clock, asynchronous designs," said Brian Kelleher, vice president of Hardware Engineering at NVIDIA. "Incisive allows us to reduce verification time, while increasing confidence in design correctness. Incisive is one of the only programs of its kind to address the complete design flow, from early-stage system design to complete in-circuit emulation."

ARM ((LSE:ARM); (Nasdaq:ARMHY)), a leading provider of 16- and 32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor technology, has selected the Cadence Incisive verification platform to develop its industry-leading processor cores, which are used in a wide range of communications, portable computing, multimedia, consumer and embedded-system ICs.

According to Simon Segars, executive vice president of Engineering at ARM, "ARM will use the Incisive verification platform to augment its existing Core Design Flow for its improvements in compile time and verification speed, its strong support for industry standards such as SystemC, its emerging assertion-based techniques and its ability to support a variety of verification IP components."

About Incisive

The Cadence Incisive(TM) verification platform is the world's first single-kernel verification platform that supports a unified methodology from system design to system design-in for all design domains. It delivers up to 100x full-chip performance throughout the entire design cycle, and compresses total verification time by up to 50 percent. The Incisive platform architecture natively supports Verilog(R), VHDL, SystemC, SystemC verification (SCV) standard, PSL/Sugar assertions, algorithm development, and analog/mixed-signal verification. With full transaction-level support, unified test generation, and Acceleration-on-Demand, the Incisive platform delivers the fastest, most efficient verification in the industry.

About Cadence

Cadence is the world's leader in electronic design technologies, 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 5,200 employees and 2002 revenues of approximately $1.3 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 www.cadence.com.

Cadence and the Cadence logo are registered trademarks, and Incisive is a trademark of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
             Sarah Miller, 978/262-6221
             sarahm@cadence.com