Cadence Selected By STMicroelectronics to Support System Design Based On New ST100 DSP

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 13, 2001-- Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE: CDN), the world's leading supplier of electronic design products and services, has announced that STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM) has selected the Cadence® Signal Processing Worksystem (SPW) as the design environment of choice for designers using the ST100 digital signal processor (DSP) core architecture for markets such as cellular phones, telecommunication systems, and advanced multimedia products.

Cadence's SPW has been enhanced with a new instruction set simulator (ISS) for the ST100 core, including debuggers and extensive documentation. The Cadence system's support of the ST100 enables state-of-the-art multi-core simulation to facilitate fast time to market and design reuse.

The ST100 core is a high-performance DSP core with 32-bit load/store architecture with multiple calculation units. The ST120 implementation has two arithmetic logic units (ALUs), and two multiply-accumulate units (MAC). Flexibility with three selectable instruction sets provides high DSP performance combined with efficient MCU capabilities.

In SPW, reusable C/C++ virtual components are modeled in floating point to optimize algorithmic performance, then switched to fixed point for portions of the model that are implemented as software on the ST100 or in hardware. With a wireless system, the complete ST100 and ASIC can be simulated with RF front-end effects from Cadence's SpectreRF product for an accurate RF baseband simulation and co-simulated with Cadence's NC-Sim to analyze and verify the ASIC.

``The Cadence SPW provides the most complete, industry-proven flow from system-level design to hardware implementation of any DSP design environment,'' said Jean-Claude Michalina, director of the DSP&Micro Division of STMicroelectronics. ``By using SPW, our customers will be able to develop advanced consumer electronics product quickly by having a state-of-the-art multi-core simulation design environment with a rapid flow to implementation.''

``The Cadence SPW software accelerates design and verification of DSP-intensive products by providing the fastest simulation, powerful analysis, and rapid implementation, thus reducing time to market. The integration of the ST100 core ISS and leading-edge debugger and C++ compiler from Green Hills Software brings hardware and software design capabilities together for communication and multimedia system-on-chip SOC) design,'' said Les Wilson, Cadence director of marketing for the SPW product.

The SPW ST100 ISS and documentation are available immediately from Cadence at no charge. The SPW ST100 ISS is available for the Sun Unix platform.

SPW is a block-oriented design, simulation, and implementation environment for electronic systems. The SPW software is ideal for algorithm development, filter design, C code generation, hardware/software architecture co-design, and hardware synthesis. A wide selection of polymorphic libraries are available that support communication and multimedia applications including baseband and physical layer processing of GSM EDGE, 3GPP, and Bluetooth, as well as JPEG2000 and MPEG2 standards.

About STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics (formerly SGS-THOMSON Microelectronics) is a global independent semiconductor company, whose shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, Paris Bourse, and Milan Stock Exchange. The company designs, develops, manufactures, and markets a broad range of semiconductor integrated circuits and discrete devices used in a wide variety of microelectronic applications including telecommunications systems, computer systems, consumer products, automotive products, and industrial automation and control systems. For more information, visit http://www.st.com.

About Cadence

Cadence is the largest supplier of electronic design automation products, methodology services, and design services 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 5,400 employees and 2000 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 may be obtained from the World Wide Web at www.cadence.com.

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

     Cadence Design Systems, Inc.       Valerie Smith, 408/428-5795       vsmith@cadence.com