Summit Design Establishes Direct Operations In Japan; Summit Design Japan Co., Ltd. to Focus on Industry Leading ESL Tools and Support

TOKYO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 17, 2003--Summit Design, Inc., the world leading provider of electronic system-level (ESL) design solutions and methodologies, today announced that Summit Design Japan Co. Ltd. has been formed, serving as Summit's first direct Japanese sales office. Previous to the opening of this office, Summit Design has spent the last 10 years distributing its products in Japan through Seiko Instruments Inc., and as of April 1st this new office serves as a direct channel to the Japanese marketplace.

"Summit, with the expert help of Seiko Instruments Inc., has built a very strong market presence with a wide-reaching and loyal customer base," said Guy Moshe, President and CEO of Summit Design. "The market has now grown to a point which requires a direct channel and presence in Japan and so we are proud to announce the opening of our Japan operations. We are determined to honor our commitments to all our customers, worldwide, through a combination of excellent support and innovative, high productivity ESL solutions."

"We have been using Summit Design's products for a long time, and we are very pleased with the establishment of Summit Design Japan," said Mr. Sumio Kasuya, Manager of System-on-a-Chip Design Division of NEC Micro Systems (www.necms.com) who develops system LSIs and software, and also provides system integration services as one of the group companies of NEC Electronics Corporation. "We expect Visual Elite to further improve our productivity and to become one of the leading system design solutions for our company."

"With this new Summit office in Japan, we will be able to better focus our sales and marketing efforts on key target segments," said Kiyoshi Makino, Representative Director, Summit Design Japan Co. "Additionally, we will be able to drive more comprehensive strategies for delivering leading technologies and methodologies to meet the needs of the evolving system level design arena, while providing superior local support to our Japanese customers."

About Summit Design

Summit Design is a leading international supplier of software products addressing engineering challenges met during the specification and implementation design phases of complex hardware/software systems. The world's top electronics companies use Summit Design's products to increase engineering productivity, shorten time to market, and improve product quality. Summit Design is headquartered in Burlington, Mass. with offices in Europe, Japan, Israel, and ROA. For more information on Summit and its products, visit http://www.sd.com.

Note to Editors: Visual Elite is a trademark of Summit Design, Inc.

All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

CONTACT: Summit Design
             Anat Zimmerman, +972.9.9708771
             anatz@sd.com
              or
             ThinkBold Corporate Communications, LLC
             Francine Bacchini, 408/267-6602
             francine@thinkbold.com