Summit Design, Inc., a leading provider of electronic system-level (ESL) design solutions, today announced it has obtained an exclusive license to the NitroVP(TM) product and related technologies from CARDtools Systems Corp, headquartered in San Jose, California. NitroVP has been used by leading electronics companies worldwide to understand SoC architecture issues such as bus architecture strategies, software/hardware interaction, component sizing, performance bottlenecks, and other partitioning and/or performance considerations. Providing a complete modeling and simulation environment for hardware, software and systems at different levels of abstraction, the NitroVP technology also serves as a deployment mechanism of IP models for OEM customers.

"Companies designing complex SoCs must analyze architectural tradeoffs very early in the design cycle in order to truly optimize system performance and power," said Emil Girczyc, president and CEO of Summit Design. "Customers using our System Architect product for architectural analysis of hardware systems have requested that we provide enhanced support for the software architecture issues. Acquiring the NitroVP technology significantly increases our support for software during architecture exploration and simplifies hardware/software architectural specification. This important investment in our ESL tool suite will enable us to accelerate our product development plans and our delivery of an unparalleled system-level architectural design environment."

The explosive growth in complexity for networking, storage systems and multi-core SoCs is driving Summit's development of next-generation architecture exploration products. These products allow architects and designers of SoCs and embedded systems to quickly evaluate system configurations, perform architecture tradeoffs, evaluate co-design tradeoffs and perform co-simulation -- all within a single design environment. By integrating NitroVP with System Architect(TM), Summit will provide increased architecture exploration and performance analysis capabilities to software architects. Customers that have employed architectural analysis to set key design decisions have improved their design quality and experienced a reduction in design rework and schedule slip during implementation.

"NitroVP embodies several unique technologies for architecture exploration of embedded software and the associated hardware platform," said Joseph Rothman, CEO of CARDtools Systems Corp. "System Architect and NitroVP are complementary, customer-proven solutions for architecture exploration and analysis, and there is tremendous synergy between the products. Summit's considerable market presence and depth of ESL expertise, make it the ideal company to further develop and enhance NitroVP's technology."

"As part of our roadmap, we identified critical technologies for a complete architecture exploration solution at the system-level," stated Hagay Zamir, product director, architecture products at Summit Design. "Companies are using System Architect today to analyze critical architectural tradeoffs. Combining System Architect and NitroVP will create the ideal environment of simulation, modeling, and analysis tools to explore system-level architecture issues."

About System Architect

System Architect enables SoC architects and senior designers to rapidly construct, simulate and dynamically analyze the performance of various hardware and software architecture alternatives before writing detailed hardware or software implementations. System Architect has been used by customers to improve their design quality and reduce project effort and risk for SoCs in demanding applications such as SAN, networking, digital media, and satellite communications. System Architect is available today. For details regarding this product and the value of architecture exploration and analysis, please visit www.sd.com.

About Summit

Summit Design's industry-leading ESL and HDL solutions enable SOC companies to deliver products that meet system-level performance and power targets with dramatically reduced schedule risk. Summit's products address engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation design phases of complex hardware/software systems. System Architect(TM) enables massive increases in design complexity and performance by analyzing architectural tradeoffs to arrive at optimized system specifications. Vista(TM) and Visual Elite(TM) ensure swift, successful design modeling and implementation in SystemC, Verilog, and VHDL. Top electronics companies worldwide, including leaders in the wireless, automotive, and consumer electronics space, have achieved dramatic reductions in design cycle time through their use of Summit's products. Summit Design is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. with offices throughout the US, Europe, Japan, Israel, and ROA. To learn more, please visit http://www.sd.com.

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