New IC Routing Start-up Company - Pulsic - is Officially Announced

Bristol, UK - 18 January 2002 - Pulsic Limited, a British EDA start-up that develops and markets IC routing solutions, today officially announced the company. Pulsic's mission is to provide the ultimate routing product in terms of performance, completion and quality of result, to address the increasingly demanding challenges of analog, custom, mixed-signal and system-on-chip (SoC) design.

Lyric™, Pulsic's innovative shape-based router is built on the company's exclusive and ground-breaking T-route™ technology, and delivers a benchmarked five-times performance gain over the fastest competitive solutions available today. Offering the most advanced set of features including extraction-based timing, signal integrity and interactive editing, Lyric is also the only unified solution that can address the mixed-signal market, with the ability to route digital and analog circuits in a design.

Commenting on the formal announcement of the new company, Mark Williams, co-founder and chief executive officer said, "Pulsic is developing a new shape-based routing product that can address the entire IC design spectrum. We are initially targeting the analog, custom and SoC markets, but our strategy is to also challenge large digital block and standard-cell designs with the very same technology. Lyric already successfully handles designs with well over 100,000 nets and cells, and ultimately we will be able to offer a single physical design solution for all IC routing requirements."

The founding members of Pulsic and its senior consultants have over 70 years of accumulated EDA experience, specifically in the field of routing. Williams was formerly manager of IC place and route research at Zuken-Redac Systems Ltd. (now Zuken Inc.). Jeremy Birch, co-founder and chief technology officer, was senior designer and CAD manager at ST Microelectronics. Mark Waller, co-founder and chief operating officer, was a key developer and project leader of IC place and route research at Zuken-Redac Systems Ltd. Fumiaki Sato, co-founder and senior vice president of business development, was IC business manager for Zuken Inc.

Since its foundation in September 1999, Pulsic has focused on the R&D of its unique routing technology, and has been working closely with several early adopter customers who have used the router in a proven working environment, and have been an integral part of the product development process. Pulsic has already sold full maintenance licenses to numerous blue chip customers, including microprocessor and consumer electronics companies. Further evaluations of Lyric are currently underway, and Pulsic is now completing development of its first mass-market release, scheduled for customer shipping later in Q1 2002.

About Lyric
Lyric is based on the company's new and ground-breaking routing technology, called T-route™, which has evolved from shape-based techniques, and is where Pulsic's expertise is firmly entrenched. "With ever increasing design complexities, and their associated interconnect effects, the only way forward to ensure timing closure and signal integrity while maintaining design completion is by using a shape-based approach", stated Jeremy Birch, CTO. "The traditional problem with shape-based approaches is that while they offer unparalleled flexibility, they can be slow when required to handle large and complex designs. T-route overcomes these limitations", he added.

The extensive feature set available within Lyric includes advanced interactive editing and placement capabilities that allow the user to make adjustments to the floorplan/placement should they be required after global routing analysis. Pulsic's products use industry-standard design formats enabling them to work with tools from Cadence, Synopsys and other vendors as well as having their own ASCII database format.

About Pulsic
Pulsic provides physical design tools for complex analog, custom, mixed signal IC and system-on-chip (SoC) designs. The company's product suite includes advanced solutions for interactive editing, timing closure, topological routing for power/clock and signal integrity. Pulsic was founded in September 1999 and is a privately held company headquartered in Bristol, UK. For more information email info@pulsic.com, telephone +44 (0)117 906 94 94 or visit www.pulsic.com. Pulsic will be exhibiting Lyric at the Asia South Pacific DAC show (Kitakyushu, Japan) taking place January 21-24, 2002.

Editorial Contacts:

Pulsic Limited:
Mark Williams, Chief Executive Officer
Tel: +44 (0)117 906 94 94
Direct: 0117 906 94 82
mark.williams@pulsic.com
Web: www.pulsic.com

PR Agency:
Sharon Graves
Pentacom PR
Tel: +44 (0)1242 525205
sharon.graves@pentacomagency.com

Note to Editors: T-route™ Shape-based Routing Technology
Due to ever shrinking process technologies, ever finer wiring resolutions are required which subsequently raises problems of data complexity, timing and signal integrity. These problems are becoming evident in all areas of IC design: analog, custom, mixed-signal and SoC. The only effective solution flexible enough to address all these problems is one built on shape-based technology.

Typically, IC designers today use gridded solutions for large digital blocks and standard cell designs and, to a limited extent, for top-level SoC designs, whereas they tend to use the far more flexible shape-based solutions for the smaller designs in analog, custom and some top-level SoC.

The consistent increase in design complexity means that existing shape-based solutions are no longer adequate. In addition, large block and standard-cell designs are now suffering from completion, signal-integrity and timing problems that only a shape-based routing solution is flexible enough to resolve.

T-route technology aims to provide ultra high performance and feature-rich shape-based routing solutions that can address the entire IC design spectrum, eliminating historical performance and capacity limitations.

Note: For further information about Pulsic, or a product screen shot, contact Karen Galpin on tel: +44 (0)1242 525205 or karen.galpin@pentacomagency.com

Pulsic, Lyric and T-route technology are trademarks of Pulsic Limited. All other trademarks and trade names are the property of their respective holders.