• Monolithic System Technology, Inc. (Mosys; San Jose, CA) filed a registration statement with the Securities and Exchange Commission relating to the proposed initial public offering of its common stock. The company expects that the offering will be completed in the fourth quarter of 2000. Mosys designs, develops, licenses and markets memory technologies used by the semiconductor industry and electronic product manufacturers. Mosys has patented an embedded-memory technology, called 1T-SRAM, which offers a combination of high density, low power consumption, high speed, and low cost. J.P. Morgan Securities, Inc. will act as the lead underwriter of the offering. The co-manager will be Wit Soundview Corp.
• Magma Design Automation, Inc. (Cupertino, CA) and Prolific, Inc. (Newark, CA) are working together to develop an automated solution for generating design-specific library components. The new solution is a Magma-specific version of Prolific's Liquid Library software that interfaces to Magma's Blast Chip RTL to silicon design implementation system. Blast Chip analyzes the design, identifying the specific components needed to improve performance, and then instructs Prolific's software to build them. Having jointly specified the tool requirements and the tool interface, Magma and Prolific are currently testing the solution. The companies have signed an OEM agreement giving Magma rights to distribute the customized Prolific software. After testing is completed it will be made available to users of Magma's Blast Fusion and Blast Chip systems. Other terms of the agreement were not disclosed.
• ASIC Alliance Corp. (Woburn, MA) opened its a new Design and Verification Center (DVC) located in Research Triangle Park, North Carolina. The new office's proximity to numerous leading technology companies in the Greater Raleigh/Research Triangle Park area make this office a valuable resource, the company said. The Research Triangle Park DVC is the sixth office opened this year, expanding the total number of ASIC Alliance locations in the United States and Canada to 10. Additional Design and Verification Centers are planned to open elsewhere in North America this year. ASIC Alliance is a provider of tools, processes, and services to companies developing products with complex, sub-micron ASIC and FPGA technologies.
• Tality Corp. (San Jose, CA), a provider of engineering services and intellectual property for the design of complex electronic systems and integrated circuits, expanded its Surelink supply-chain network to include ANT Limited (Cambridge, UK), a provider of embedded communication appliance software solutions. ANT's software enables manufacturers to incorporate customized web browsing and email functionality at low integration costs, into consumer electronics and Internet devices, such as digital TV, set top boxes and PDAs. ANT's Fresco Browser and Simplemail email client are aimed at applications in one of Tality's primary target markets: consumer communications products. By adding ANT to its Surelink program, Tality can integrate ANT's advanced communications software into products for its clients, the company said.
• In East Kilbride, Scotland, Micron Europe Ltd. opened a new £9.7 million manufacturing facility which currently employs around 250 staff and is aiming to recruit a further 112, taking total employment to more than 360 by 2002. The company made the announcement as Scottish Executive Minister for Enterprise and Lifelong Learning Mr. Henry McLeish performed the opening ceremony of its manufacturing plant at Peel Park Campus, East Kilbride. The East Kilbride facility will be the hub for all of its European memory module production and sales and includes module assembly, test, quality control, product delivery and service, and support for product applications. The facility will also house Crucial Technology Europe, which is a division of Micron Technology, Inc. which markets and sells memory upgrades for personal computers.
• Synopsys, Inc. (Mountain View, CA) and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) agreed to jointly develop silicon-calibrated technology files across TSMC's advanced processes, including 0.13-micron, for Synopsys' Arcadia layout parasitic extraction tool. Arcadia technology files for the popular TSMC processes have been certified and are available for download from TSMC's password-controlled website. "TSMC is focused on delivering the industry's most advanced process technology to our customers to ensure high performance and reliability resulting in first-pass silicon success," said Mike Pawlik, vice president of corporate marketing for TSMC.

Movers and Shakers

• Simplex Solutions, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA) promoted three of its top executives. Penny Herscher, formerly president and chief executive officer, has been named chairman of the board; Herscher will also continue to serve as CEO. Aki Fujimura has been promoted to president in addition to his existing role as chief operating officer. Christophe Bianchi, formerly director of extraction products, will now serve as vice president of marketing. Bianchi will continue as acting director of extraction products until the search for a replacement is completed. The company currently develops full-chip, multi-level IC extraction and analysis software, used by companies developing microprocessors and integrated circuits (ICs) to improve chip performance and reliability.
• Novas Software, Inc. (San Jose, CA) announced that its board of directors has named Scott Sandler as the company's president and chief executive officer. Sandler was previously Novas' vice president of product marketing and corporate support. The company's founder Dr. Paul Huang remains as chairman of the board and hands over his chief executive duties to Sandler. Before joining Novas in 1999, Sandler held marketing and support positions with formal verification pioneer Chrysalis Symbolic Design, a company he joined in 1994. Prior to this, Sandler held marketing management positions with Cadence Design Systems and Shiva Corp. He began his EDA career in 1986 as the first applications engineer at Verilog inventor Gateway Design Automation.
• Altra Broadband, Inc. (Pittsburgh, PA) announced that Dr. Yahya Rahmat-Samii, chairman of UCLA's Electrical Engineering Department and Dr. Anand Gopinath, professor of Electrical Engineering at the University of Minnesota, Minneapolis have joined the Board of Technical Directors. Dr. Rahmat-Samii has over 20 years of research and development experience in satellite and personal wireless communications, photonic bandgap structures, as well as measurement and diagnostic techniques. He is the recipient of numerous awards and honors including the Henry Booker Award of URSI and the IEEE Third Millennium Medal and is the holder of several patents. Prior to joining UCLA, Dr. Rahmat-Samii was a senior research scientist at the Jet Propulsion Laboratories. Dr. Anand Gopinath is a renowned developer of fiber optic components and photonic integrated circuits, including his recent work on low-loss wave guide optical amplifiers. Starting with his research at MIT Lincoln Laboratories, to his current work at the University of Minnesota, Dr. Gopinath has spent the last 25 years designing, fabricating, and testing optical/RF circuits, high-speed lasers, laser amplifiers, and integrated optical modulators. Altra Broadband is a subsidiary of Ansoft Corp. and is focused on developing critical intellectual property, technology, and products for broadband fiber optic and wireless communications.

  Money Bits

  Virage Logic Corp. (Fremont, CA) announced its initial public offering of 3,750,000 shares of common stock at a price of $12 per share. This coincides with an additional private placement to affiliates of Crosslink Capital, Inc. of 403,226 shares of common stock at the offering price, less the amount of the underwriting discount. The shares commenced trading on the Nasdaq National Market under the trading symbol "VIRL." With the completion of the initial public offering and the concurrent private placement, the company has raised gross proceeds of $49.5 million. The offering was led by Lehman Brothers, and co-managed by Robertson Stephens and SG Cowen. Virage Logic provides semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) for the memory elements of silicon chips that may be used in appliances and products such as cellular and digital phones, DVD players, switches and modems.

• STMicroelectronics, ARM, and Sony Corp. invested $14 million in Coware, Inc. (Santa Clara, CA). All three investors are long-term Coware customers or partners. Before this round, Coware received almost $14 million in venture capital funding in two previous rounds from Greylock, Needham & Company, GIMV and IT Partners. Coware, Inc. was founded in 1996 to develop tools and methodologies that help engineering teams cut their system-on-a-chip design times in half.
• Silicon Metrics Corp. (Austin, TX), developers of very deep sub-micron (VDSM) characterization, modeling and timing sign-off solutions, today announced the receipt of over $8 million in financing. Cadence Design Systems was the lead investor in the round that included Austin Ventures, Current Ventures II Limited, and Needham Capital Partners. Investment terms were not disclosed. The current funding will enable Silicon Metrics to complete the development and roll out of their new products. Adoption of its VDSM characterization tools has propelled the company to focus on delivering a new generation of VDSM modeling and timing sign-off solutions, based on the company's Selective Model Accuracy Refinement Technology (SMART).
• ECI Telecom Ltd. (Petah Tikva, Israel) reported revenues for the second quarter 2000 of $317.2 million, an increase of 17 percent compared to $271.6 million recorded in the second quarter of 1999. Gross profits were $145.5 million compared to $147.2 million in the second quarter of 1999. Operating income for the second quarter of 2000 was $2.0 million compared to $56.1 million for the same period last year. Net income for the second quarter of 2000 was $6.7 million or $0.07 per diluted share compared to $53.6 million or $0.57 per diluted share last year. Second quarter 2000 results include a charge for in-process R&D of $28.8 million associated with the acquisition of Winnet and Wavepacer and $1.6 million associated with the disposal of Hitv. Excluding these non-recurring items, net income from continuing operations for the second quarter of 2000 was $37.1 million or $0.40 per diluted share, compared to net income from continued operations of $57.3 million, or $0.61 per diluted share for the same period last year. ECI Telecom Ltd. is a provider of integrated network solutions for digital communications and data transmission systems. The company designs, develops, manufactures, markets, and supports end-to-end digital telecommunications solutions for today's new services and converging networks.
• Axis Systems, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA), a supplier of electronic design automation (EDA) verification solutions, reported that the company has achieved its third consecutive quarter of increasing profitability on record revenues of over $3.5 million for the second quarter of this year. The majority of the revenues were for the company's accelerated verification solution, Xcite, the company said. The revenue growth represents an 80 percent increase when compared to revenues for the second quarter of 1999. Xcite incorporates Axis' proprietary Reconfigurable Computing (RCC) engine with Altera Corp.'s programmable logic devices (PLDs) to reduce functional verification or simulation time for networking and multimedia designs using Sun Microsystems workstations.

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