SAN FRANCISCO — OrCAD Inc. and Exemplar Logic Inc. have joined hands in a deal whereby OrCAD will integrate the synthesis engine from Exemplar's Leonardo Spectrum tool into an October upgrade of the OrCAD Express design environment. The companies will announce their partnership this week at the Design Automation Conference here.

The move gives Exemplar (Alameda, Calif.) exposure to the OrCAD Express user base of 3,500 to 4,000 designers, and a way to tap into the 150,000 total OrCAD seats. It allows OrCAD (Beaverton, Ore.) to round out its Express PCB and FPGA design tool with better FPGA synthesis and optimization features tuned to processes from a number of PLD vendors. OrCAD users also get a path to ASIC design.

Tom Feist, vice president of marketing at Exemplar, said the move will give Exemplar access to users making the transition to HDLs. "OrCAD is targeted at the designer moving from schematic to HDL," he said. "OrCAD Express is a complete solution that allows them to do mixed schematic and HDL design. It gives us access to those users that are in the transitional mode."

Jim Plymale, OrCAD's vice president of marketing, said that OrCAD and Exemplar have traditionally aimed at two separate segments of the market. "We target the 50 percent of system designers that are also responsible for designing their own programmable logic, while Exemplar has mainly targeted chip designers," he said.

Plymale said the Leonardo Spectrum synthesis engine will replace OrCAD's Daytech synthesis engine in the Express tool. It will be offered as a free upgrade in October. The Exemplar tool has been better optimized for a variety of PLD vendor architectures, he said, and also offers a path to ASIC synthesis via its support for the .lib ASIC library format from Synopsys Inc.

Said Plymale, "If you're going to ASICs, the only thing that matters is that you are Synopsys compatible. That is what Exemplar provides: ASIC-compatible libraries."

Exemplar's Feist said the technology going into OrCAD Express is a basic configuration of Leonardo Spectrum and is gate limited. To get full FPGA synthesis capabilities and basic ASIC synthesis capabilities, users need to license one of three versions of Leonardo from Exemplar.

Plymale said users can still connect other third-party synthesis tools, but the tools won't be able to share a common GUI.