Summit Design Joins Open Core Protocol International Partnership; Provides Customers with Standard Infrastructure for SoC Plug and Play Design

PORTLAND, Ore.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Dec. 15, 2003— Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP), the association providing a common standard for intellectual property core interfaces, or sockets, that facilitate "plug and play" SoC design, today announced that Summit Design has joined the organization. Joining OCP-IP allows Summit customers to have a standard infrastructure to plug-and-play different processors, bus architectures and peripherals.

"As a company focused on SoC and Electronic System Level Design (ESL), the protocol and inner bus communication are an important part of the system," said Guy Moshe, president and chief executive officer (CEO) at Summit Design. "There is tremendous value in using OCP as a standard protocol as it significantly simplifies design and verification, addressing a clear and present need for our customers. We believe that the standardization initiative around SoC design will dramatically facilitate the adoption of ESL."

OCP provides SystemC-based channels that will become part of Summit's Visual Elite channel library, so its customers can simply connect their bus, processor and peripheral through a standard channel. The Visual Elite ESC solution provides high-performance system modeling and a verification platform for target processors, and will now have a unified communication interface that can be shared across the various architectures.

"We are pleased to have Summit Design, a leader in system-level design, join the OCP-IP community," said Ian Mackintosh, president of OCP-IP. "OCP's SystemC-based channels are a natural fit for Summit's Visual Elite channel library."

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.

About OCP-IP

The OCP International Partnership Association, Inc. (OCP-IP) was announced in December 2001 to promote and support the open core protocol (OCP) as the complete socket standard that ensures rapid creation and integration of interoperable virtual components. OCP-IP's Governing Steering Committee participants are: Nokia (NYSE:NOK), Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN), STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM), United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE:UMC), Sonics, and other industry leading companies. OCP-IP is a non-profit corporation delivering the first fully supported, openly licensed core-centric protocol that comprehensively fulfills system-level integration requirements. The OCP facilitates IP core reusability and reduces design time and risk, along with manufacturing costs for SoC designs. VSIA endorses the OCP socket, and OCP-IP is an Adoption Group of the VSI Alliance. For additional background and membership information, visit www.OCPIP.org.

Visual Elite is a trademark of Summit Design, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.

OCP-IP
Ian Mackintosh, 650-938-2500 ext. 106
ian@ocpip.org
    or
VitalCom
Joe Basques, 650-366-8212 ext. 202
joe@vitalcompr.com
    or
Summit Design                 
Anat Zimmerman, +972-9-9708771                
anatz@sd.com
    or
ThinkBold Corporate Communications, LLC
Francine Bacchini, 408-267-6602
francine@thinkbold.com