November 2004

Dear Synopsys Customer:

NOTE: The information in this letter affects only those customers using Red Hat Linux versions 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x. If this does not apply to you, please disregard.

We believe our customers need stable, well-supported operating systems (OS) on which to run their EDA tools. Thus, we wish to inform you that Synopsys is migrating our baseline Linux OS from Red Hat version 7.2 (RH 7.2) to Red Hat Enterprise (RHEL) version 3.0. As you may already know, Red Hat discontinued support in early 2004 for all of their consumer versions, including 7.x, 8.x, and 9.x.

RHEL 3.0 is our baseline OS for product feature releases starting in 2004.09. Red Hat does not guarantee binary compatibility between RH 7.2 and RHEL 3.0. Products built and tested on RHEL 3.0 will not run on the consumer releases 7.x, 8.x, 9.x. New releases of RHEL will be upward compatible with RHEL 3.0, so products built on RHEL 3.0 will run on future versions of RHEL.

To help facilitate your migration to RHEL, RH 7.2 will be supported for 2004.12 as an additional ported OS, as well as for all 2004.12 Service Packs. Bug support for tools with RH 7.2 releases will continue for one year after their release. Products in 2005.03 and 2005.06 with feature releases will not have RH 7.2 support.

Why should you migrate? First, RHEL provides advantages such as guaranteed version-to-version binary compatibility and a multi-year support model that are necessary in business operations. Second, Red Hat gives RHEL higher quality testing and professional customer support. For instance, 32-bit applications running under RHEL 3.0 can address 3.9Gb (RH 7.2 can address only 3.2 Gb). Third, Red Hat no longer supports their consumer versions (7.x, 8.x, 9.x). Finally, the EDA Consortium (EDAC) has selected RHEL as one of their baseline OS’s. View EDAC’s OS roadmap at www.edac.org.

We believe that RHEL 3.0 offers better value and confidence in the Linux OS for EDA. The powerful combination of the latest Synopsys releases and the most advanced OS will offer you the productivity and reliability you need for today’s IC designs.

More information about RHEL can be found at www.redhat.com and www.sistina.com/Fedora.

Please contact your Red Hat representative and schedule your migration to RHEL now to experience the advantages of RHEL.

If you have any questions, please contact either your local support team or your Synopsys sales representative.

Sincerely,
Karen Bartleson
Director of Interoperability, Compute Platforms Marketing 
Synopsys, Inc.
700 East Middlefield Road
Mountain View, CA 94043-4033
Tel: 650-584-5000
Fax: 650-584-4249