MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., Oct. 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Synopsys, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNPS), a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design and manufacturing, today announced the Best Paper Awards for the tenth annual Synopsys Users' Group (SNUG®) conference in Boston, MA. At the Boston event, the first place award for Best Paper went to Clifford Cummings, Sunburst Design, Inc., for "Clock Domain Crossing (CDC) Design & Verification Techniques Using SystemVerilog." Second place went to Jonathan Wolfe, MediaTek Wireless, Inc., for "Reducing Failing Testcase Length: Mixing Brute-Force and Intelligence to Extract Meaningful Information from Many Simulations." Third place and the Technical Committee award went to Shalom Bresticker, Intel Corporation, for "Just When You Thought It Was Safe to Start Coding Again ... Return of the SystemVerilog Gotchas." The award for Best First-Time Presenter went to Eric Cigan and David Lidrbauch, The MathWorks, Inc., for "Using Cosimulation of MATLAB and Simulink with VCS in a Functional Verification Environment." The winning papers were selected by the attendees and the SNUG Technical Committee.

SNUG Boston is part of the largest user conference program in EDA. The program attracted more than 5,000 integrated circuit (IC) and system design engineers to eight technical conferences worldwide in the past year. Attendees represent the world's largest semiconductor design and manufacturing companies as well as many innovative start-ups. More than 430 technical users attended this year's Boston event, while the flagship event in San Jose on March 31 to April 2, 2008 drew record attendance of well over 2030 Synopsys users.

Two Technical Committee Honorable Mentions went to Bruce Zahn, LSI Corporation, for "A Utility for Leakage Power Recovery within PrimeTime-SI," and to Philip Watson, ARM, Ltd., and Tom Fairbairn, Synopsys, Inc., for "DC Graphical: The Promise and the Reality."

"As with previous years, the 10th anniversary of SNUG Boston provided engineers with technical depth and a unique opportunity to interact with other technologists," said Al Czamara, vice president of Hardware Engineering, LOA Technology and SNUG Boston technical chair. "The broad exposure and technical focus SNUG provides to a range of hot topics in the industry has helped make it a premier event for engineers who take on challenging semiconductor design and verification, and manufacturing issues on a daily basis."

Aart de Geus, chairman and chief executive officer at Synopsys, addressed conference attendees with a keynote that reviewed advances in electronic products, chip design and technology requirements during the past 10 years, since SNUG was inaugurated. He also discussed current designer issues such as power, design size and productivity, and how they must be addressed by considering the physics from below and the system level issues from above.

"SNUG's best paper winners demonstrate the depth of ingenuity and expertise required to address today's engineering challenges," said Aart de Geus, chairman and CEO of Synopsys. "A highlight of the conference is the opportunity for attendees to share technological challenges and solutions with their peers as well as with Synopsys executives and engineers. This spirit of learning is a key element of all SNUG conferences, and we appreciate the many engineers who come to share their insights with the broader design community."

SNUG Boston Sponsors included: Platinum Sponsors ARM, Common Platform (Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing, IBM and Samsung) and TSMC; and Gold Sponsors Hewlett-Packard, Sun Microsystems and Virage Logic. The two-day SNUG Boston conference featured a technical program with 46 presentations that focused on all areas of design including synthesis, verification, low-power design, physical design/sign off, analog/mixed-signal design, custom design, test and rapid prototyping tools. This year's program featured 27 user papers, 13 Synopsys technical tutorials, two presentations, two vision sessions and two panels. These presentations focused on the challenges that engineers face as they design complex systems for a wide array of applications.

About Synopsys

Synopsys, Inc. (NASDAQ: SNPS) is a world leader in electronic design automation (EDA), supplying the global electronics market with the software, intellectual property (IP) and services used in semiconductor design and manufacturing. Synopsys' comprehensive, integrated portfolio of implementation, verification, IP, manufacturing and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions helps address the key challenges designers and manufacturers face today, such as power and yield management, system-to-silicon verification and time-to-results. These technology-leading solutions help give Synopsys customers a competitive edge in bringing the best products to market quickly while reducing costs and schedule risk. Synopsys is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has more than 60 offices located throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Visit Synopsys online at http://www.synopsys.com/.

Synopsys and SNUG are registered trademarks of Synopsys, Inc. Any other trademarks or registered trademarks mentioned in this release are the intellectual property of their respective owners.

   Editorial Contacts:

   Yvette Huygen
   Synopsys, Inc.
   650-584-4547
   yvetteh@synopsys.com

   Andrea Zils
   MCA, Inc.
   650-968-8900
   azils@mcapr.com

SOURCE: Synopsys, Inc.

CONTACT: Yvette Huygen of Synopsys, Inc., +1-650-584-4547,
yvetteh@synopsys.com; or Andrea Zils of MCA, Inc., +1-650-968-8900,
azils@mcapr.com, for Synopsys, Inc.

Web site: http://www.synopsys.com/