SynTest Establishes Operations in China and Appoints Hyperform as Distributor; SynTest Opens New Center for R&D and Customer Support

SUNNYVALE, Calif.—(BUSINESS WIRE)—Jan. 22, 2004— SynTest Technologies, Inc., the leading supplier of Design-for-Test (DFT) tools and services for semiconductor integrated chips (ICs) announced that the Company has opened a new center in Shanghai, for R&D and customer support. The company has also appointed Hyperform Technologies Co., Ltd. as its distributor to service the growing IC design market in China.

SynTest's products improve an electronic design's testability and fault coverage, which result in not only reduced defect levels with lower tester time, but also reduced time-to-market (TTM).

"The growing interest in our DFT products and services, and the continuing development as well as enhancement of our products requires that we continue to add to our R&D staff," noted Dr. L.T. Wang, SynTest President and CEO.

Dr. Wang remarked, "China, with its rapidly expanding IC design market and fabless design houses, has become an important market for us. We have appointed Hyperform as our distributor for China. Hyperform -- led by James Liu, ex-Director of Sales at Cadence China, a successful and seasoned professional in the field of electronic design and EDA -- was a logical choice for us." He added, "As we firmly believe that technical support is an important pillar of our success, expanding our technical support resources was a given simultaneous step."

"Today, with more and more IC design companies in China doing high-end designs, it is the right time to promote the DFT concept to make their designs into reliable products," remarked James Liu, CEO, Hyperform. He further noted, "As a startup company, I want to bring the best DFT technology and services to our customers. SynTest, who has been playing a major role in the DFT arena for 14 years, and offers the whole DFT solution, from scan, compressed scan, to logic-BIST, was our natural choice."

About SynTest

SynTest Technologies, Inc., established 1990, develops and markets advanced design-for-test (DFT) and design-for-debug/diagnosis (DFD) tools throughout the world, to semiconductor companies, system houses, and design service providers. The company's products improve an electronic design's testability and fault coverage and result in reduced defect levels and reduced slippage in time-to-market (TTM). The products also reduce overall design and test costs, by helping to reduce design iterations as well as the time and reloads on automatic test equipment (ATE). These products include tools for logic BIST, memory BIST, boundary-scan synthesis, DFT testability analysis, VirtualScan synthesis and ATPG with XtremeCompact test vectors, concurrent fault simulation, silicon debug and diagnosis. The company, headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., has offices in Taiwan, Korea, Japan, and China, and has distributors in Europe and Asia including Israel. More information is available at www.syntest.com.

About Hyperform

Hyperform Technologies Co., Ltd. (HTC) based in Shanghai, is a privately held company with a mission to provide major brand EDA solutions and design methodology locally to promote the electronic design industry in China. More information is available at: http://www.hyperform-da.com/.

SynTest, VirtualScan, and XtremeCompact are trademarks of SynTest Technologies, Inc. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Acronyms:

ASIC: Application Specific         DFT:  Design-for-Test
       Integrated Circuits
ATE:  Automatic Test Equipment     DFD:  Design-for-Debug/Diagnosis
IC:   Integrated Circuits          SoC:  System-on-Chip
ATPG: Automatic Test Program       EDA:  Electronic Design Automation
       Generation
BIST: Built-In Self-Test           TTM:  Time-to-Market

SynTest Technologies
Nayan Pradhan, 408-720-9956 Ext. 301  
nayan@syntest.com     
    or
Hyperform Technologies
James Liu, +86-21-5356 0140 or +86-1390 1631 878 (cell)
jameslgj@hyperform-da.com