Wilsonville, OR, May 18, 2010—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/.

AUSTIN, Texas, May 18, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — National Instruments (NASDAQ:NATI) today announced the availability of more than 100 C Series plug-in modules from National Instruments and third-party companies. With more than 50 modules from NI, 50 third-party modules and a multitude of chassis available, there are numerous configuration options to address a wide variety of measurement and embedded control needs. Engineers and scientists can insert NI C Series modules into any of the C Series family of chassis including NI CompactDAQ, NI CompactRIO and the NI R Series expansion chassis to create a variety of mixed measurement systems. Additionally, they can use the third-party modules in any of the field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based chassis, including all NI CompactRIO and R Series expansion chassis.

“Reaching 100 C Series modules is a big milestone and a powerful testament to the popularity and flexibility of the C Series platform,” said John Hanks, vice president of industrial and embedded product lines at National Instruments. “With the NI and third-party modules, customers are building sophisticated systems in record time compared to traditional methods.”

NI CompactRIO features the NI reconfigurable I/O (RIO) architecture, which is composed of a real-time processor, an FPGA and integrated I/O connectivity. Using this standard architecture, engineers and scientists can rapidly design and prototype advanced control and embedded devices on hardware such as CompactRIO and quickly deploy their systems on the lower-cost CompactRIO integrated systems or NI Single-Board RIO hardware to reduce development costs. In addition to CompactRIO, engineers and scientists can use NI and third-party C Series modules with the NI 9144 EtherCAT slave chassis for high-performance deterministic distributed I/O over EtherCAT. Integrators and third-party resellers also can design their own custom C Series modules for CompactRIO and add-on boards for NI Single-Board RIO with the NI cRIO-9951 Module Development Kit (MDK).

NI CompactDAQ USB chassis provides the plug-and-play simplicity of USB to sensor and electrical measurements on the benchtop, in the field and on the production line. By combining more than 50 NI C Series modules with NI signal streaming technology, the NI CompactDAQ platform delivers high-speed data and ease of use in a flexible, mixed-measurement system. The NI CompactDAQ chassis connects to any device or computer running a full Windows OS and can hold up to eight NI C Series modules.

Engineers and scientists can use all C Series modules with NI LabVIEW software, a graphical programming environment that uses intuitive graphical icons and wires that resemble a flowchart to develop sophisticated measurement, test and control systems. NI LabVIEW offers integration with thousands of hardware devices, provides hundreds of built-in libraries for advanced analysis and data visualization and is scalable across multiple targets and OSs.

For more information on the various C Series modules, readers can view the white paper, “A C Series Platform for Every Application – 100 Modules and Counting” on NI Developer Zone or visit the C Series online resource kit at www.ni.com.

About National Instruments

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 15 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 5,000 employees and direct operations in more than 40 countries. For the past 11 years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company’s investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090, e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting www.ni.com/nati.