(EMAILWIRE.COM, June 04, 2001 ) Cadence Design Systems, Inc. (NYSE: CDN), the world's leading supplier of electronic design products and services, today announced the PSpice®Advanced Analysis solution that uniquely enables analog/mixed-signal circuit engineers to employ sophisticated design methodologies on the Windows NT and 2000 platforms. The most comprehensive analysis solution to address the mainstream printed circuit board (PCB) design market, the new product allows users to optimize performance and improve quality of designs before committing them to hardware.

"Until now, comprehensive advanced analysis capabilities have been available only in the very high-end products, such as the Analog Workbench from Cadence," said Jamie Metcalfe, vice president of marketing for the PCB Systems Division of Cadence. "The new PSpice Advanced Analysis solution brings these capabilities to the cost-conscious mainstream designer, enabling tremendous efficiencies and product improvements."

The PSpice Advanced Analysis option provides integration with Cadence's Concept® HDL and Orcad Capture® industry-standard PCB design capture tools. The new product will prove especially valuable to designers of components for large-volume consumer products such as audio/video equipment and power supplies. Systems with higher reliability requirements such as those in test instrumentation, industrial controls, and aerospace products will also greatly benefit from the Advanced Analysis solution.

In analog circuit design there is a phase when the design topology and the specifications are known but the final component values have not yet been determined. The PSpice Advanced Analysis solution enables engineers to pick up the design at that point and take it to the next level. It helps tune the design so it meets specifications and allows the designer to evaluate and improve design robustness and manufacturing yield.

"The new advanced analysis feature of PSpice gives me the capability to quickly optimize my amplifier or filter designs in either the time or frequency domain," said Ruben Aguila, staff engineer and analog designer at Litton Advanced System, Inc. "As a result, the time expended to improve a design has been decreased by up to 50 percent. Several critical parameters can be automatically adjusted to have the design converge on specification requirements. This is ideal for designs that do not lend themselves easily to breadboarding."

PSpice Advanced Analysis Features

PSpice Advanced Analysis software enables virtual prototyping and so eliminates hardware prototype spins. Four important capabilities - sensitivity analysis, optimization, yield analysis, and stress analysis - combine to address design complexity and price/performance/quality requirements of circuit design.

Sensitivity analysis uses measurement definitions to provide insight into the significance of individual components in relation to performance. In addition, sensitivity analysis:

Identifies components whose variation significantly affects each measurement
Helps engineers choose the most effective parameters to adjust in order to improve performance
Helps reduce costs by showing engineers which parts can have looser tolerances
Optimization automatically calculates component values to meet design specifications and maximize performance, accelerating one of the most tedious parts of the design process. This methodology is ideal to get a new design topology to meet performance specifications or to push performance in an existing design. With four different optimization engines available, designers can be assured that the Optimizer will be able to find the optimal circuit component values given the desired specifications.

Yield (Monte Carlo) analysis predicts product yield prior to production and allows designers to confidently balance cost and performance issues. It also:

Enables early statistical analysis
Provides statistical reports for measurements, including probability density histograms and probability distribution plots
Provides statistical data such as minimum, maximum, mean and median values, and standard deviation
Stress (Smoke) analysis improves reliability of a design by reducing the likelihood of hardware failure. Designers are able to analyze a circuit looking for devices that exceed various safe operating limits, such as overvoltage, power dissipation, secondary breakdown, junction temperature, and others.

Designers may also create custom derating files to lower the tolerance for stress in specific components, further improving the design's reliability.

New device models that support parameterized components make it easy for engineers to take full advantage of the product's capabilities - especially for power supply design.

Price and Availability

The PSpice Advanced Analysis solution will be available as an option to the PSpice or PSpice A/D products or as part of the new PSpice Studio product in the second quarter of 2001. It will work with both Concept HDL and Orcad Capture schematic design tools. PSpice Studio includes PSpice A/D and the PSpice Advanced Analysis option. The new Advanced Analysis option is supported on Windows 98, Windows NT 4.0 SP6a and later, and Windows 2000.

Pricing starts at a U.S. list of $6,600 for a one-year license. For pricing outside of North America, contact your local Cadence® office or distributor.

About PSpice Circuit Simulator

The PSpice product is a full-featured analog/mixed-signal circuit simulator. PSpice software includes a powerful and robust simulation engine and works with Orcad Capture and Concept HDL design capture tools or PSpice Schematics in an integrated environment where engineers create designs, set up and run simulations, and analyze simulation results.

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.

The Cadence PCB Systems Division, a worldwide PCB EDA market leader, addresses the entire range of design needs in the PCB market, with complete tool suites available on Windows, Windows NT, and UNIX platforms. With approximately 5,700 employees and 2000 revenue of approximately $1.3 billion, Cadence has sales offices, design centers, and research facilities located 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, Orcad Capture, Concept, and PSpice are registered trademarks of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners

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Produced for Cadence

Contacts:

Tyler Magee
Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
PCB Systems Division
503.968.5049
tmagee@cadence.com

Meg Kenagy
Armstrong Kendall, Inc.
For Cadence PCB Systems Division
503-672-4694
meg@akipr.com

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Contact Information:
Cadence Design Systems, Inc.
Joseph Nchor
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