CoWare Acquires LISATek, Secures Leadership in SoC Design

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 27, 2003--

CoWare(TM), Inc., the leading supplier of system-level electronic design automation (EDA) software, today announced that it has acquired LISATek(TM), Inc., a company that is revolutionizing the automation of embedded processor use for system-on-chip (SoC) designs. All LISATek employees have joined the CoWare team. Financial terms of the acquisition are not being disclosed.

"The semiconductor industry urgently needs innovative ways to conquer the growing complexity of SoC designs," says Alan Naumann, president and chief executive officer (CEO) of CoWare. "By combining the two companies, CoWare has taken a bold step towards solving the hardware and embedded software challenges facing the industry."

With the advent of 90nm semiconductor process technology and the rapid move of the semiconductor industry to SoC design, the use of embedded processors is skyrocketing. These dedicated processing devices are often included alongside leading commercial processor IP. However, there has been little automation available for rapid modeling, hardware design, and the creation of software development tools. In addition, high-performance models of commercial IP that can be used by both software and hardware engineers are often not available until late in the design process.

The LISATek technology automatically generates all necessary models and tools for hardware design, embedded software development, and for the integration and verification of these embedded processing devices within a system-on-chip (SoC) environment. This includes automatic generation of high performance simulation models, target assemblers, linkers, and synthesizable RTL code. LISATek has comprehensive debugging and profiling capabilities, including simultaneous debugging of multiple cores.

"By bringing together the leading technologies for system-level and embedded processing design, we now offer our customers a powerful solution which significantly increases designer productivity in the development of SoCs, application specific standard products (ASSPs), and embedded processors," notes Uri Mayer, CEO and president of LISATek. "Together, the team is focused on making SoC design dramatically more productive."

CoWare's presence in Europe is expanded with the addition of LISATek's development and support site in Aachen, Germany. CoWare also gains important strategic ties with Aachen Technical University's ISS Institute where the LISATek technology originated. The Institute continues its research into processor design automation which will be integrated into future CoWare releases. The ISS institute joins IMEC (Leuven, Belgium) as a CoWare advanced research and development partner. Close relationships with two world-renown institutes accelerates CoWare's technology lead in an area of rapid technology change.

About CoWare

As the leading supplier of system-level electronic design automation (EDA) software and services for system-on-chip (SoC) designers, CoWare, Inc. provides a platform-based design methodology that can cut design time in half. As a founder and leader of SystemC, CoWare is driving the industry toward a unifying system design language. CoWare software is employed today by major systems, intellectual property (IP) and semiconductor companies, including Alcatel, ARM, Canon, Fujitsu, InterDigital, Matsushita, Motorola, Nokia, Samsung, Sanyo, Sony, ST Microelectronics, Tensilica and Toshiba. For the second year, the San Jose Business Journal recognized CoWare in 2002 as one of the fastest growing private companies in Silicon Valley. For more information visit: www.coware.com.

CoWare is a trademark of CoWare, Inc. LISATek is a registered trademark and EDGE, HUB, RIM, and JIT-CC are trademarks of LISATek, Inc.

CONTACT: CoWare, Inc.
             Mindy Powers, 408/392-8513
             mindy@CoWare.com
             or
             Public Relations for CoWare
             Nanette Collins, 617/437-1822
             nanette@nvc.com