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Concept Engineering Releases Perl/Tk Schematic Visualization Software

Atrenta incorporates the new Nlview PTK Widget into the SpyGlass platform

, Germany – June 12, 2003 – Concept Engineering has released a new Perl/Tk software component for its Nlview Widget family that enables developers to build powerful electronic design automation (EDA) tools based on Perl, and to use Tk to realize intuitive graphical user interfaces. In addition, Atrenta Inc. (San Jose, Calif.) has signed a licensing agreement with Concept Engineering to incorporate the new component, called NlviewPTK Widget, into its SpyGlass® family of predictive analyzers.

NlviewPTK Widget is the first schematic visualization engine to bring together the Tk graphical toolkit with Perl, the popular programming language used for scripting, flow automation, file manipulation, and system administration. The Nlview Widget family provides a broad range of components for GUI development – Qt, Java, Tcl/Tk, MFC, and now Perl/Tk – for automatic schematic generation and viewing at all design levels: transistor, gate, block, register-transfer, and system.

"EDA companies are finding it too expensive and time-consuming to develop and maintain their own schematic generation tools," said Gerhard Angst, president and CEO of Concept Engineering. "Using ready-made software components such as the Widgets saves EDA teams a lot of time and money. We are very happy that Atrenta has selected our technology and that we can work with them to accelerate product development."

Atrenta, Inc. is the first licensee of Concept Engineering's NlviewPTK Widget. By incorporating the NlviewPTK Widget into SpyGlass, users can display a schematic of synthesized logic and cross-probe between RTL code and the schematic. Design rule violations are highlighted in both the schematic and the source code so users can better understand design problems and quickly find solutions.

"Our partnership with Concept Engineering has allowed us to quickly expand the capabilities of SpyGlass with a more powerful debug environment" said Ghulam Nurie, senior vice president of marketing and business development for Atrenta. "By integrating Concept Engineering's industry-standard schematic generation and viewing technology with our leading predictive analysis solution, we can help SpyGlass users shorten design and debug time for complex ASICs and SoCs."

About SpyGlass

SpyGlass® uses a unique predictive analysis technique to perform detailed structural analysis on Verilog and VHDL RTL in order to detect complex design problems early in the design cycle, resulting in reduced development costs, lower risk and early time to market. SpyGlass' fast-synthesis engine creates a structural representation of the design allowing the most comprehensive and accurate analysis of RTL to detect problems not normally visible in the RTL. SpyGlass was selected by EDN magazine as one of the Top 100 products for 2002 and also received the "LSI Design of The Year 2002" award by Japan's Semiconductor Industry News.

About Atrenta

Atrenta's groundbreaking Predictive Analysis technology accelerates the design of SoCs, ASICs and FPGAs by analyzing downstream requirements upfront. SpyGlass has been widely adopted by more than 50 of the world's leading electronics companies, including eight of the top ten semiconductor companies. Atrenta was chosen by Venture Reporter as one of the top 100 venture-backed companies for 2002. For further information, visit the Atrenta website at www.atrenta.com, email moreinfo@atrenta.com, or call 408-453-3333.

About Nlview Widgets

Nlview Widgets integrate with the most popular GUI development environments, including Tcl/Tk, Java, MFC, ActiveX and Perl. Nlview Widgets relieve EDA tool designers of the tedium and productivity loss of having to develop their own schematic generation software by providing a set of robust and flexible software components for automated schematic generation and viewing. By adopting Nlview Widgets, developers can quickly realize GUIs for EDA products with shorter design cycles and lower development and maintenance costs.

About Concept Engineering

Concept Engineering, a privately held company based in Freiburg, Germany, was founded in 1990 to develop and market innovative schematic generation and viewing technology for use with logic synthesis, verification, test automation and physical design tools. The company's customers are primarily original equipment EDA tool manufacturers (OEMs), in-house CAD tool developers and semiconductor companies. The company is located at Boetzinger Str. 29, D-79111 Freiburg, Germany. Telephone: +49-761-47094-0, Fax: +49-761-47094-29, www.concept.de

Contacts:

Concept Engineering
Gerhard Angst, +49-761-47094-0, info@concept.de, www.concept.de

Cayenne Communication LLC for Concept Engineering
Michelle Clancy, +1-252-940-0981, michelle.clancy@cayennecom.com