Cadence and dSPACE to Collaborate on Distributed Model-Based Design Flow for Automotive Applications

BADEN-BADEN, Germany--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 25, 2003--Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN) today announced it has started a collaboration with dSPACE, the world's leading supplier of tools for developing and testing new mechatronic control systems. The collaboration will support the Cadence(R) vision, flows, and methodologies for the design of distributed safety critical control applications for car electronics.

"We are happy to collaborate with dSPACE, as the company has a long-standing reputation of competence in the area of automotive development tools," said Paolo Giusto, Cadence Automotive Team marketing director. "We believe this collaboration can provide benefits to our customers by merging our Cadence automotive system design solution with the dSPACE TargetLink production code generator, therefore enabling our vision of a distributed model-based design for safety critical automotive applications."

"Customers are increasingly asking for integrated solutions in this area," said Thomas Thomsen, dSPACE TargetLink product manager. "There is a demand for a tool chain that starts with system architecture design of distributed electronic control unit (ECU) networks and provides support down to the level of production-quality software components. We are committed to supporting such solutions." By entering into this cooperation, Cadence has joined forces with the market leader in production code generation for its new solution.

In collaboration with leading-edge European automotive companies, Cadence has been adapting and extending existing components of its system-level design technologies for automotive-specific uses, creating an innovative distributed model-based design environment for car electronic architectures. The environment extends the classical approach -- targeting a single electronic control unit (ECU) at a time, from specification to software implementation -- to a work flow where the entire system, constituted by a network of ECUs, is modeled and validated by running simulations on a host workstation. The work flow supports the shift from physical prototyping to virtual prototyping, by providing capabilities for model import, integration, and simulation before hardware is available. The work flow also supports early fault injection and analysis on the virtual prototype. Functional models from third-party tools can be imported and re-used within the Cadence automotive system design solution dSPACE TargetLink plays a major role in the import of "The Mathworks" Simulink models.

Both Cadence and dSPACE will exhibit at the 11th International Congress "Electronic Systems for Vehicles" in Baden-Baden, Germany Sept. 25 and 26.

About Cadence

Cadence is the largest supplier of 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 5,000 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.

About dSPACE

Sales growing at a constantly high rate, over 400 personnel, more than 10000 installations throughout the world: This is dSPACE today, after more than 10 years as the world's leading supplier of tools for developing and testing mechatronic control systems.

dSPACE systems enable manufacturers of controllers and electronic control units (ECUs) to reduce their development times and costs dramatically and noticeably increase their productivity. This is made possible by an optimum mixture of standard solutions for rapid control prototyping, automatic production code generation and hardware-in-the-loop simulation. If necessary, comprehensive services are available, from on-site training to customer-specific system engineering.

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

CONTACT: Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
             Andrea Huse, +49 (0) 89 4563 1726
             ahuse@cadence.com