Mentor Graphics and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Open the Road to Silicon-Proven Designs

WILSONVILLE, Ore., and MILPITAS, Calif. -- July 2, 1997 -- Mentor Graphics Corporation's Inventra(tm) Business Unit and Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing today announced a joint marketing and technology agreement that will offer the industry greater choice in reliable fabrication of advanced chips.

The agreement will enable integrated circuit design teams to utilize silicon-proven libraries with selected intellectual property in designs and have chips fabricated using Chartered's leading edge manufacturing processes. Inventra will develop and supply standard cell, memory and datapath libraries for Chartered's 0.35-micron fabrication process, and the two companies will jointly develop test chips based on a subset of Inventra's CoreAlliance(tm) pre-designed circuits, for design verification in silicon. In addition, Mentor will develop a design kit comprising the cell libraries, cell attributes required for use with HDL and logic synthesis tools offered by various suppliers.

"Inventra is in the business of ensuring that customers have rapid access to proven designs in whatever form and physical implementation they require, said Glenn House, senior vice president, Strategic and Product Operations, Mentor Graphics Corporation. "Our collaboration with Chartered offers our mutual customers reliability and productivity they need to get system-on-a-chip designs to market quickly." "As a dedicated foundry, Chartered's objective is to shorten the time between product design and market entry for our customers. To support this objective, Chartered's strategy has been to develop relationships that give our customers the tools and services that best fit their product requirements," said Ray Hawkins, senior vice president, worldwide sales and marketing. "This agreement gives Chartered's customers faster access to proven silicon of selected IP cores from Mentor's portfolio of intellectual property cores and CoreAlliance products."

Inventra's CoreAlliance(tm) is a collection of high-performance, industry standard reusable design blocks that offer engineering teams significant productivity gains for a variety of system-on-chip target markets. By partnering with Inventra design experts on physical implementation of the design, engineering teams can focus on value added tasks and key differentiators for their systems-on-a-chip.

The Inventra business unit of Mentor Graphics is the world's leading independent creator and distributor of reusable intellectual property for the system-on-chip industry. The extensive Inventra product line provides EDA tool-independent cores, memories, physical libraries, embedded software and services. CoreAlliance products include ATM, 10/100Mb/1Gb Ethernet, MIPS, MPEG-2 and Analog Devices ADSP21xx. Inventra's IP products lower the cost of implementing design reuse, allowing designers more time to focus on unique, value-added circuitry.

Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ:MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products and consulting services for the world's largest electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of $440,392,000 and employs approximately 2,570 people worldwide. Company headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. World Wide Web site: http://www.mentorg.com.

Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing is a pure-play foundry providing quality manufacturing and exceptional service for customers worldwide. Chartered offers a full complement of advanced technologies which include deep-submicron CMOS logic, memory and mixed signal processes. All production fabs are certified to ISO9002 standards. In addition, Chartered offers a full turnkey service from process technology application and mask generation to delivery of tested packaged parts. A member of Singapore Technologies, Chartered is headquartered in Singapore with offices in the United States, Europe, Japan, and Taiwan.

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