WILSONVILLE, Ore., Sept. 9, 2003 - Mentor Graphics Corp. (Nasdaq: MENT) today announced a collaboration with Xilinx, Inc. (NASDAQ: XLNX) to provide seamless operation between its FPGA Advantage™ design environment and Xilinx's recently announced Integrated Software Environment 6.1i (ISE). FPGA Advantage, Mentor's FPGA design environment, incorporates the Mentor Graphics HDL Designer Series™ design management environment, the ModelSim® simulator, the LeonardoSpectrum™ and Precision™ Synthesis tools. Integrated with Xilinx's new ISE 6.1i tools, FPGA Advantage delivers a complete FPGA flow that redefines the standard for productivity in programmable logic design software. Both Mentor and Xilinx are committed to providing the most complete, intuitive design solution available for FPGA design. Through their continued technology collaboration, the two companies provide designers with a comprehensive field programmable system-on-chip design environment that enhances productivity, shortens design time and reduces overall development costs. The enhanced FPGA design flow includes hardware and software design creation and verification environments with synthesis, design management, timing analysis and place and route capabilities. This design suite, coupled with Xilinx flagship Virtex-II Pro™ Platform FPGAs and 90nm/300mm Spartan-3™ low-cost FPGAs, creates the most cost-effective hardware/software solution available in logic design today. "Mentor Graphics, as the leading vendor of FPGA design software, understands the difficulties of today's complex FPGAs. With the increasing number of complex design starts, designers need an environment that allows them to rapidly create and debug a design, and achieve timing closure. Mentor provides customers superior point tools as well as a complete, integrated solution for FPGA design that answer this challenge," said Simon Bloch, general manager of Mentor Graphics design creation and synthesis division. "With close cooperation between Xilinx and Mentor, our ISE 6.1i integration enables customers to take advantage of both the power of the FPGA Advantage design environment and key ISE's features, such as the Xilinx place and route, timing analyzer, and power analysis features. This integration reduces learning curves and accelerates time to productivity."