Quickturn announces complete high-performance ethernet verification environment that accelerates simulation performance by 10,000X

For more information, please contact:

 Ran Avinun
Quickturn
Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
408.914.6540
ran@quickturn.com

 Abbie Kendall
Armstrong Kendall, Inc.
For Quickturn, a Cadence Company
503.672.4681
abbie@akipr.com
 
 

SAN JOSE, Calif., May 22, 2000, Quickturn(tm), a company of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE:CDN), today announced its complete high-performance environment to accelerate the verification of Ethernet and Gigabit Ethernet products including switches and routers. This new environment enables network equipment designers to test their complete system, including software and hardware, as well as real-world network traffic early in the development cycle - reducing the verification process from weeks to hours. The solution is available for deployment at the customers' site or by remote access via the Quickturn QuickCycles(tm) program. Customers choosing to access this new verification environment remotely via Quickturn's QuickCycles program can use Quickturn's secure virtual private network (VPN). Providing remote access to this new environment is part of the iCadence strategy for leveraging the Internet to improve the productivity of Cadence customers.

 According to Ran Avinun, senior solutions marketing manager at Quickturn, "Quickturn is focusing on key growth markets including the networking market by providing complete, hardware-based verification environments for networking devices and systems. The new Ethernet verification environment integrates Quickturn's hardware acceleration and in-circuit emulation systems, third-party measurement and testing equipment, and Quickturn's SpeedBridge(tm) rate adapters." Using this environment, design teams can easily build and debug hardware and test software before chip tape-out. This environment accelerates design cycles by several months, increases product quality, and accelerates time-to-market for new products.

 In developing the new Ethernet verification environment, Quickturn partnered with Netcom Systems, Inc. to develop a test interface between Quickturn's CoBALTPlus(tm) and Mercury(tm) emulation systems and Netcom Systems' SmartBits tester. According to Jim Jordan, vice president of worldwide sales at Netcom Systems, "As the leaders in their respective industries, Netcom Systems and Quickturn saw a great opportunity to provide customers with a single verification solution for development, prototyping, and production. With the new Quickturn Ethernet verification environment, customers can smoothly switch from register-transfer-level (RTL) implementation to their real chips, verifying their whole system at the pre- or post-silicon phase."

 Alteon WebSystems, Inc. (Nasdaq:ATON), of San Jose, California, is one of the most recent networking customers to use Quickturn's new environment through the QuickCycles program. According to Shirish Sathaye, chief technical officer at Alteon WebSystems, "We chose Quickturn as our verification solution provider when we developed our flagship Web switching product. We value the combined technology of the Quickturn CoBALTPlus emulator and its new networking verification solution. We are also impressed with the remote access capability provided through the QuickCycles program."

 Features And Benefits Of The Quickturn Environment For The Networking Market

 The Quickturn functional verification environment for the networking industry provides:

 
• PCI SpeedBridge interface for hardware/software co-verification - plugs into a PC and interfaces to the design in the emulator, enabling designers to debug their networking management software at an accelerated speed. The PCI SpeedBridge rate adapter allows verification of the emulated design at a speed of up to one MIPS.
• Ethernet SpeedBridge interface - enables designers to connect their emulated switch or router to a real-world network line, and to test and debug their product before tape-out.
• Integration with the leading third-party networking tester - allows verification engineers to execute corner cases and stress tests by generating packets and noise, then analyzing circuit behavior with the tester.
• Quickturn supports industry standard interfaces -including Gigabit Ethernet, Fast Ethernet, reduced media-independent interface (RMII) and serial media-independent interface (SMII). This environment lets a designer quickly switch from testing an emulated design to testing the application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) when it returns from the fab. This accelerates the test program cycle, saving three to six months of development time.
• Quickturn Time-to-Market Engineering (TtME(tm)) services - help customers implement verification environments by managing the project schedule as well as the customization and integration of a customers' specific design verification environment.
• The QuickCycles program - provides access to Quickturn's networking verification environment remotely through Quickturn's secure VPN. The QuickCycles program targets the needs of designers faced with functional design verification bottlenecks, budget constraints, and limited or no emulation experience.

Netcom Systems' SmartBits products are the industry's only multi-port network performance analysis systems capable of generating and analyzing traffic, at full wire rate, over hundreds of ports for: 10/100/Gigabit, Gigabit Copper, Packet Over Sonet, ATM, Frame Relay, WAN, xDSL, Cable Modem, Voice Over IP, Multicast IP, and TCP/IP. SmartBits award-winning hardware and software applications are used by more than 1,100 of the world's leading network equipment manufacturers, network service providers, corporate enterprises, and test laboratories to measure the performance and services of networks and network devices.

 Netcom Systems is a SPIRENT company. For more information on the company and its' products, visit the website at http://www.netcomsystems.com or call 818.676.2300.

 About Alteon WebSystems, Inc.
Founded in 1996 and based in San Jose, California, Alteon WebSystems (Nasdaq: ATON) is an Internet infrastructure company. The company manufactures and markets Web switches and server adapters and is credited with pioneering the concept of Web switching. Web switching combines content and application switching with advanced IP traffic functions into a single, highly scalable platform. For more information about Alteon WebSystems and its products, call 408.360.5500 or visit http://www.alteonwebsystems.com.

 About Quickturn
Quickturn, a Cadence company, is the leading provider of high-performance verification products and time-to-market engineering (TtME) services for the design and verification of complex integrated circuit (IC) and electronic systems. Quickturn products and services are used by developers of high-performance computing, multimedia, graphics, networking, and communications systems. For more information, visit the Quickturn web site at http://www.quickturn.com, send e-mail to info@quickturn.com or call at 408.914.6000.

 About Cadence
Cadence is the world's largest supplier of electronic design automation products, methodology services, and design services used to create electronics-based products. Cadence design solutions help companies to innovate and achieve sustainable competitive advantage in the age of the electronics revolution and the internet. With more than 5,000 employees and 1999 annual revenue of $1.1 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities located around the world. The company is headquartered in San Jose, California, and traded on the New York Stock Exchange under the symbol CDN. For more information, visit http://www.cadence.com.

 Forward-Looking Statement
Except for historical information, the matters discussed in this release contain forward-looking statements based on current expectations or beliefs and are subject to factors and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those described in the forward-looking statements. For a detailed discussion of these and other cautionary statements, please refer to Cadence's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission. These include the Company's Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended January 2, 1999 and the most recent Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended October 2, 1999.

 Cadence is a registered trademark and Quickturn, QuickCycles, SpeedBridge, CoBALTPlus, Mercury, and TtME are trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.