SAN JOSE, Calif. & PORTLAND, Ore.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Jan. 18, 2006— Summit Design, Inc., a leading provider of electronic system-level (ESL) and hardware description language (HDL) design solutions, and Actis Design, LLC, the leader in SystemC linting tools, today announced their collaboration aimed at promoting SystemC coding styles that ensure increased productivity and high-quality, maintainable code. By linking AccurateC(TM) with Vista(TM) Integrated Design Environment (IDE) for SystemC, the companies enable mutual customers' use of a supported flow that simplifies SystemC design and debug.

"Improving the quality of the SystemC code via source code analysis and design rule checking ensures a coding style that is readable, maintainable and easy to debug," says Joan Bartlett, president of Actis Design. "AccurateC provides designers feedback in terms of SystemC methodology specifics early in the design flow. Working with Summit, we are creating a supported flow that enables Vista users to use AccurateC to ensure their design meets SystemC coding rules before expending time and effort simulating and synthesizing code that may contain errors."

Mutual customers will be able to invoke AccurateC from within the Vista IDE. The integration of AccurateC linting technology with Vista SystemC debugging and transaction level modeling (TLM) analysis environment will greatly enhance and speed-up system specification and verification.

"Vista builds upon industry standard, open gnu tools, making it easy to extend and integrate in existing or emerging ESL flows," says Emil Girczyc, president and CEO of Summit Design. "Summit continues our commitment collaboration with leading ESL vendors to provide the best-in-class flow for SystemC design, from model creation, to debug and analysis, through to RTL implementation. Through this integration, Vista is now augmented with a powerful linter technology that enables our customers to greatly improve their SystemC coding productivity."

About Summit's Vista IDE

Vista is a design environment for SystemC that combines both hardware and software concepts to speed design and debug of SystemC applications. It is easy to adopt, since it builds upon the industry standard gnu tools. It's unique Data Introspection, design exploration and debugging features make for more rapid understanding of designs and the verification process. Vista also offers advanced coding facilities, browsers, and a verification toolset targeted for high-level and transaction-level modeling. The unique debugging capabilities are possible because of its in-depth understanding of SystemC.

About Actis' AccurateC

AccurateC promotes consistent coding standards across design teams for readable and maintainable code, and reuse and modification in future projects. It shows syntax and semantic coding errors where they occur in the design code, not in obscure library or system files as compilers do. For designing hardware, connectivity errors within a netlist are identified, the code is reviewed against modeling guidelines for synthesis, and a full set of good coding style checks are included. A Forte Cynthesizer ruleset is also included.

About Summit

Summit Design's industry-leading ESL and HDL solutions enable SOC companies to deliver products that meet system-level performance and power targets with dramatically reduced schedule risk. Summit's products address engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation design phases of complex hardware/software systems. System Architect(TM) enables massive increases in design complexity and performance by analyzing architectural tradeoffs to arrive at optimized system specifications. Vista(TM) and Visual Elite(TM) ensure swift, successful design modeling and implementation in SystemC, Verilog, and VHDL. Top electronics companies worldwide, including leaders in the wireless, automotive, and consumer electronics space, have achieved dramatic reductions in design cycle time through their use of Summit's products. Summit Design is headquartered in Los Altos, Calif. with offices throughout the US, Europe, Japan, Israel, and ROA. To learn more, please visit http://www.sd.com.

About Actis Design

Actis Design was formed in 2001 as a spin-off of the software product and consulting services businesses of Willamette HDL. It provides software tools and methods to enhance SystemC- and hardware description language (HDL)-based hardware designs. Its software suite includes AccurateC(TM) and Ten Minute Tutor(TM) (TMT), a computer-based training program that teaches Verilog HDL and VHDL. Actis Design provides a wide range of consulting services to both EDA product suppliers and consumers. Corporate headquarters is located at 515 NW Saltzman Road, Suite 775, Portland, Ore. 97229. Telephone: (503) 645-2183. Facsimile: (503) 645-6574. Email: info@actisdesign.com. Online information is found at its website: http://www.actisdesign.com.

All trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned in this news release are the intellectual property of their respective owners.

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