Mentor Graphics Delivers the Industry’s First Physical Synthesis Solution for Altera Stratix III Device Family

WILSONVILLE, Ore., January 17, 2008 – Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) today announced that its Precision® RTL Plus product includes the industry’s first vendor-independent physical synthesis to support the Altera® Stratix® III product family of high-performance, high-density field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs). Altera’s internal testing found that designs that benefit from Mentor’s Precision RTL Plus product achieved performance improvement of over eight percent for Stratix III designs, compared to Precision Synthesis. Therefore, the Precision RTL Plus product can help users achieve faster timing closure, which could lower overall FPGA design development costs.

“Precision is the only vendor-independent tool with physical synthesis support for our high-performance FPGA family,” stated Danny Biran, senior vice president of corporate and product marketing for Altera. “The addition of Stratix III support will allow our mutual customers to get better timing results and to benefit from other unique Precision RTL Plus capabilities, such as automatic incremental synthesis and resource allocation.”

Altera and Mentor Graphics have worked closely together over the last six months, ensuring that their mutual customers will benefit from the increased productivity and comprehensive design synthesis support in using the Precision RTL Plus product for Altera Stratix III devices. Mentor’s support for Stratix III devices is available now with the Precision 2007a Update 1 and later versions, and it is compatible with Altera Quartus® II design software version 7.2 and above.

“We are committed to supporting Altera devices with intuitive high-performance synthesis solutions, and we recognize how important the Stratix III device family is for high-end FPGA applications,” stated Simon Bloch, general manager, Mentor Graphics design and synthesis division. “The benchmark results that Altera provided us confirmed that Precision RTL Plus keeps improving the quality of results for Altera devices.”

Precision Synthesis: The Centerpiece of Mentor Graphics FPGA Flow
The Precision Synthesis product forms the centerpiece of the Mentor Graphics FPGA flow — the industry's most comprehensive vendor-independent solution for FPGA design. It’s the only synthesis tool which offers true push-button, multi-vendor physical synthesis for achieving the best quality of results. With comprehensive language support, including SystemVerilog, advanced ASIC prototyping flow and automatic incremental synthesis, the Precision Synthesis product is uniquely suited to handle today’s high-end FPGAs. The Precision Synthesis product features award-winning design analysis capability, allowing designers to cross-probe between multiple views as well as perform interactive static timing "what-if" analyses. Precision Synthesis reduces design iterations, and enables faster, more predictable completion of designs, while delivering high quality of results.

About Mentor Graphics
Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world’s most successful electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of about $825 million and employs approximately 4,300 people worldwide. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. World Wide Web site: http://www.mentor.com/.

 

Mentor Graphics and Precision are registered trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other company or product names are the registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners.

For more information, please contact:
Larry Toda
Mentor Graphics
503.685.1664
larry_toda@mentor.com

Suzanne Graham
Mentor Graphics
503.685.7789
suzanne_graham@mentor.com