Denali and StarGen Team on Advanced Switching Product Roll-out

Collaborative effort solves pre-silicon interoperability verification, speeds adoption of new Advanced Switching (AS) interface technology

PALO ALTO, Calif., December 2, 2003 --Denali Software, Inc., the leading provider of electronic design automation (EDA) tools for chip interface design and verification, and StarGen, the market leader in semiconductor solutions for advanced serial interconnects, today announced a collaborative effort to insure interoperability of products utilizing the Advanced Switching (AS) interconnect. StarGen engineers have selected Denali’s PureSpec™ verification IP to simulate, and verify compliance and interoperability of the AS interface in StarGen’s new StarXpress product line. Denali has extended its PureSpec product platform to enable StarGen to verify interoperability with other AS chip developments. The enhanced interoperability solution allows StarGen and other AS chip developers to create and exchange simulation models of their AS interfaces under development, and simulate the interaction between their designs early in the development cycle. The collaborative effort will significantly reduce risk and time-to-market by exposing potentially differing interpretations or implementations of the AS interfaces to the development teams before their designs are committed to silicon.

Advanced Switching (AS) is an emerging technology based on the PCI Express architecture that allows for the standardization of today's proprietary based backplanes. StarGen is leveraging its switched interconnect expertise to help drive the development of AS industry standards. Similar in features to StarFabric, AS uses the same physical-link and data-link layers as the PCI Express architecture and provides a roadmap to higher performance specifically targeting next generation communication, storage and server architectures. StarGen is currently developing its StarXpress product line based on these standards.

"Denali plays a key role in providing tools for developing complex chip interfaces for new and emerging standards such as PCI Express and AS technologies," said David Mayhew, Chief Design Architect, at StarGen. "Verifying AS interfaces is a key part of our chip development process, and using Denali’s PureSpec product in our verification flow gives us complete confidence that our designs are compliant with the AS standard. But the most critical issue is interoperability. As one of the first to market with products for the new AS standard, it is critical that we take a leadership role in ensuring interoperability with other AS designs. We are excited about working with Denali to address the interoperability issue, which ultimately ensures a rapid and successful roll-out of AS technology into the marketplace."

"Our role is to provide industry leaders such as StarGen with solutions for developing and verifying designs that incorporate complex chip interface standards," said Denali CTO Mark Gogolewski. "What we are really talking about here, especially in the case of AS, is enabling a rapid and successful adoption of the standard. Through this collaborative effort, we are able to leverage widespread use of the PureSpec product in the industry and enable our customers to coordinate verification efforts and achieve pre-silicon interoperability verification. We are pleased to be working with StarGen, and look forward to their successful launch of their AS-based products."

"The Advanced Switching specification is receiving overwhelming support from companies throughout the communications industry," said Rajeev Kumar, president of the ASI-SIG and Advanced Switching technology manager of the Intel Communications Group. "Design tools for verifying compliance and interoperability, such as those from Denali, are a key part of the ecosystem and help to speed broad adoption of the Advanced Switching Interconnect standard."

About PureSpec
PureSpec is a verification IP product used by chip designers to simulate, and verify PCI Express and AS design interfaces. PureSpec models all devices in the topology; all protocol layers (physical, data link, transaction) of the specifications are completely modeled and can be simulated concurrently or independently. The product contains thousands of assertions that are monitored during simulation to ensure compliance with the specifications, and interoperability with other compliant devices. The PureSpec product is built on the proven product architecture of Denali’s MMAV product, which has been used to verify complex memory interfaces for thousands of successful designs, and provides seamless integrations to all popular EDA tools and verification languages. Proven product platform, dedicated customer support, and unmatched EDA modeling and verification expertise make PureSpec the best-in-class verification IP solution for complex chip designs. The PureSpec product is available now at: www.denali.com/purespec

About StarGen, Inc.
StarGen is a semiconductor company providing advanced serial switched interconnect solutions for compute and communications equipment. It is the leading designer of low-overhead, protocol-agnostic, open standards-based serial switched architectures, which enable system designers to bring new capabilities to their system while using existing standards-based parts. StarGen's currently shipping StarFabric product line benefits vendors of access communication platforms for voice, data, and video networks as well as vendors of embedded systems needing enhanced switched PCI capability. StarGen is also currently developing StarXpress, a complementary line of products built upon the Advanced Switching standard and compatible with PCI Express™. These products will be ideal solutions for blade server, storage, and mid-range communications applications. StarGen's switched interconnect products provide a dramatic increase in equipment performance, scalability, reliability, and Quality of Service while maintaining backward compatibility to existing standards based hardware and software. StarGen (www.stargen.com) is headquartered in Marlborough, MA.

About Denali Software, Inc.
Denali Software Inc. is the world's leading provider of EDA tools and Semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP) solutions for chip interface design, integration, and verification. PureSpec is the industry leading solution for verifying compliance and interoperability for PCI Express and Advanced Switching interfaces. Denali's Databahn memory controller cores are licensed for use in over 80 chips and provide designers with the highest quality solution for interfacing with all new and emerging high-performance memory technologies. Denali's MMAV product is the de facto industry standard for modeling and simulating memory during all phases of design and verification. Memory selection, memory controller configuration, and memory system performance analysis are supported through Denali's online infrastructure at eMemory.com. More than 400 companies worldwide use Denali's tools, technology, and services to design and verify complex chip interfaces for communication, consumer, and computer products. For more information, please visit Denali at www.denali.com or contact Denali directly at: 650-461-7200

Denali, the Denali logo, Databahn, eMemory, MMAV, and PureSpec are trademarks of Denali Software, Inc., all rights reserved. PCI Express is a trademark of PCI-SIG. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.