Quickturn Announces IP Program to Provide High-Speed Hardware/Software Co-Verification Environment for SoC Designs

New IP Form Factor for Quickturn Palladium Enables Customers to Integrate IP Cores Into Their Verification Environments

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 3, 2002-- Quickturn(TM), a company of Cadence® Design Systems, Inc.   today announced a new IP program that will enable electronic system and semiconductor companies to utilize cores from intellectual property (IP) vendors more quickly and effectively. This program is part of the Cadence Design Chain Initiative, which seeks to tighten development relationships within the electronics industry.

As part of this initiative, Quickturn has developed a new IP card capable of handling the latest high-pin-count packages. This allows field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), digital signal processors (DSPs), embedded processors, and other IP cores to be interfaced to the rest of a design through the IP chassis of a Palladium(TM) design verification system. Each IP chassis can hold up to six IP cards and support up to 3,512 I/O pin connections.

This capability allows integration of pre-verified, hard IP cores with system on chip (SoC) designs for high-speed hardware/software co-verification. Quickturn customers ARM, Ltd. and TriMedia Technologies, Inc. are the first IP vendors participating in the program, making available verified IP cards and software debug environments for mutual customers.

"As a user of Quickturn verification systems, ARM recognizes the need for our customers to verify their ARM embedded software at high speed," said Gordon Stubberfield, marketing manager at ARM.

"We are working closely with Quickturn to provide verification solutions to help our mutual customers verify ARM core technologies with the rest of their SoC designs in Quickturn's systems. Today ARM's Integrator core modules can be interfaced with Quickturn verification systems, and we are working with Quickturn to ensure that future Integrator modules will integrate with the new Palladium IP card. These solutions will enable our customers to reuse ARM pre-verified IP cores in all of Quickturn's verification environments."

"TriMedia selected Quickturn to verify our VLIW TM32A processor core and peripherals with our development software environment," said Sunil M. Sanghavi, CEO of TriMedia Technologies, Inc. "Quickturn Video and PCI SpeedBridge(TM) products help us test our environment with live audio, video, and our standard software development platform. In addition, common customers like Philips will have access to kits that include a pre-verified VLIW IP card with our proprietary software development environment, including a software debugger for high-speed hardware/software co-verification of SoC designs."

"As a customer of both Quickturn and TriMedia, Philips gets tremendous value emulating its TriMedia IP core-based SoC designs with Quickturn's verification system," said Mark Samuel, marketing director, Philips Semiconductors. "It also allows us to verify our hardware and software much earlier in the design cycle by running diagnostics, operating systems, audio and video applications, and tools for interfacing to the chip before tape out. Once the chip arrives, the software requires minimal effort to bring up on silicon, because the functional bugs were already corrected in emulation."

"Many of our networking, wireless, and multimedia customers are designing SoCs with embedded IP," said George Zafiropoulos, vice president of marketing at Quickturn. "The new IP cards enable customers to verify IP-based designs with Palladium. I am pleased that ARM and TriMedia have chosen to use Quickturn for verification of their IP. We've worked closely to help our mutual customers verify ARM and TriMedia embedded designs."

Product Availability and Pricing

In the second half of 2002 Quickturn will begin providing Palladium IP cards supporting ARM and TriMedia IP cores. ARM and TriMedia software development environments are available immediately from ARM and TriMedia, respectively. For more information on product pricing and availability, contact Quickturn in North America at 408/914-6000. For pricing and availability outside of North America, visit www.quickturn.com/about/location.htm for the name of a Quickturn representative in your area.

About Quickturn

Quickturn, a Cadence company, is the leading provider of high-performance verification solutions and Time-to-Market Engineering (TtME(TM)) services for the design and verification of complex IC and electronic systems. Developers of high-performance computing, multimedia, graphics, and communications systems use Quickturn products and services. For more information, visit the Quickturn web site at www.quickturn.com, call 408/914-6000, or send e-mail to info@quickturn.com.

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 5,600 employees and 2001 revenues of approximately $1.4 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 Quickturn, Palladium, SpeedBridge, and TtME are trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.