MENT Mentor Graphics Corp.

Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT), the market and technology leader in printed circuit board (PCB) design solutions, today announced the release of the vSure™ version 9.0 product, the successor of Valor Enterprise 3000™ Design-for-Manufacturing (DFM) product. The enhancements in this release enable designers to more easily perform extensive DFM analysis during the PCB design process, thus improving their productivity, avoiding costly design re-spins, and speeding the time to target high-volume production. Electronics companies can now better meet their aggressive business goals of getting a more competitive product to market on time and at reduced manufacturing costs.

Early adopters of the new version have already been praising its benefits. "I have found vSure 9.0 invaluable in ensuring our designs are production ready," stated Ken Haerterich, Senior PCB Designer at Zebra Technologies Corporation. "The simplicity of the application, coupled with the increased performance, has resulted in huge time savings in our release schedule."

The vSure product can verify more than 700 DFM manufacturing requirements on a PCB design during the development process, ensuring that the data transferred into manufacturing is ready for production engineers to perform bare board and assembly manufacturing without requiring design changes. The vSure product uses the same "golden" Valor Parts Library (VPL™) used in the manufacturing environment to assure consistency between the checks performed by the designers and manufacturing engineers.

"Mentor's acquisition of Valor and the enhancement of their DFM technologies are enabling us to better meet the business goals of the electronics industry's most advanced companies," stated Henry Potts, vice president and general manager of Mentor Graphics Systems Design Division. "Avoiding a design re-spin or achieving a reduction in the manufacturing cost of a product can mean the difference between profit and loss for these companies."

The vSure product line integrates with both Mentor and non-Mentor PCB design solutions to address a worldwide market in all industry segments. The version 9.0 release contains major enhancements including:

• A Manufacturing Risk Assessment interface that enables designers to quickly review DFM analysis results focusing on the most critical. Potential design problems can be filtered and sorted by various categories including severity, board location, padstack types, package or part numbers and features.
• A Design Process Wizard to guide designers through the DFM process following a best practice sequence of steps from the import of design data to the viewing of analysis results. The wizard executes all actions in accordance with industry-tested practices to ensure a comprehensive analysis while reducing the need for a designer's detailed manufacturing expertise.
• Hierarchical and mathematical-based analysis-rules modeling that enables adjustment of analysis rules based on the technology, design center, processes or manufacturer's capabilities. The need for complete re-definition of rule-sets when technologies change is eliminated. In addition, management of multiple rule-sets is supported, thus reducing setup time and potential analysis errors.
• A significantly simplified user interface to improve the productivity of the designer while insuring a comprehensive DFM analysis process.

The vSure release 9.0 product is available now. For more information, go to http://go.mentor.com/vsure.

About Mentor Graphics Mentor Graphics Corporation (NASDAQ: MENT) is a world leader in electronic hardware and software design solutions, providing products, consulting services and award-winning support for the world's most successful electronics and semiconductor companies. Established in 1981, the company reported revenues over the last 12 months of about $800 million and employs approximately 4,425 people worldwide. Corporate headquarters are located at 8005 S.W. Boeckman Road, Wilsonville, Oregon 97070-7777. World Wide Web site: http://www.mentor.com/.

(Mentor Graphics is a registered trademark and vSure and VPL are trademarks of Mentor Graphics Corporation. All other company or product names are the registered trademarks or trademarks of their respective owners).

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For more information, please contact: Larry Toda Mentor Graphics 503.685.1664 larry_toda@mentor.com Suzanne Graham Mentor Graphics 503.685.7789 suzanne_graham@mentor.com