Atrenta teams up with VSI Alliance to develop an automated method to validate IP quality

SpyGlass will Ensure High Quality IP through QIP Compliance

San Jose, CA,  May 10, 2004 -- Atrenta® Inc., the Predictive Analysis Company, announced it has joined the Virtual Socket Interface Alliance (VSIA), the SoC, IP, and reuse standards group driving system chip productivity. Atrenta is partnering with VSIA’s Quality IP (QIP) development working group to implement and automate the QIP rules, guidelines and documentation in Atrenta’s award-winning SpyGlass® Predictive Analyzer product. This will enable ASIC and SoC designers to perform in-depth structural analysis on Verilog and VHDL Register Transfer Level (RTL) descriptions as well as assess the quality of the IP and ensure compliance with best practices and IP reuse guidelines based on the QIP rules. Additionally, IP providers will be able to use SpyGlass to quickly create QIP compliant IP and IP integrators will be able to use SpyGlass to quickly verify the incoming IP for QIP compliance.

“It is imperative that there be a standard quality assurance process that measures and evaluates the quality of silicon IP against a checklist of critical issues,” said Bill Billowitch, IP design reuse and development manager at Agere Systems and a VSIA board member. “We are very pleased that Atrenta has joined VSIA in order to work towards building the QIP rules directly into the SpyGlass product, thereby providing an automated way for QIP compliance checking. This is a major step in VSIA’s efforts to bring the best design techniques in the industry to the design community worldwide.”

“The importance of the IP Quality development working group is demonstrated by leaders such as Atrenta who are joining VSIA to both influence and implement the QIP metric,” said Michael Kaskowitz, VSIA President.  “We believe that Atrenta’s market leadership and technical expertise will benefit our membership base and we look forward to working with them.”

“There has been a growing need for an industry standard to ensure high-quality IP and common metrics that both the IP provider and the IP integrator can use,” stated John Rizzo, vice president of marketing at Atrenta.   “VSIA has developed QIP to address this issue, but until now this standard has been only a written document with no method to automatically check compliance.  Atrenta will now automate this checklist and provide in-depth diagnostics during RTL development to help both the IP providers and IP integrators to meet requirements quickly and easily.”  

About VSI Alliance
The VSI Alliance is an open, international organization that includes representatives from all segments of the SoC industry: System houses, Semiconductor vendors, Electronic Design Automation companies, and Intellectual Property providers. VSIA’s vision is to dramatically improve the productivity of SoC development by specifying open standards and specifications that facilitate the integration of software and hardware Virtual Components from multiple sources. Many companies have adopted the use of VSIA specifications, standards and documents. VSIA has wide industry participation with more than 100 member companies from around the world. Membership is open to any company with an interest in the development and promotion of open standards used in the design of System-on-Chip. For more information, visit the VSIA web site at www.vsi.org.

About Atrenta
Atrenta delivers predictive analysis solutions to the world’s leading electronics companies, including eight of the top ten semiconductor companies. Its pioneering and award-winning SpyGlass Predictive Analysis tools accelerate the design of SoCs, ASICs, and FPGAs by detecting complex chip design problems that are not easily identified with conventional verification methods.SpyGlass has been recognized through several distinguished awards, including EDN magazine’s Top 100 products and "LSI Design of the Year" award by Japan's Semiconductor Industry News. Most recently, SpyGlass Constraints was named as an EDN Innovation Awards finalist for 2004. Atrenta was also chosen by Venture Reporter as one of the top 100 venture-backed companies, and named by AlwaysOn as one of the Top 100 private companies.
 
Atrenta, with headquarters in San Jose, California, employs over 140 personnel worldwide. It has European offices in England and France, a research and development center in India, and sales and support distributors in Europe, India, Israel, Japan, Korea, Singapore, and Taiwan. For further information, visit the Atrenta website at www.atrenta.com, or call 408-453-3333.