Connex Technology Pick Tharas Systems' Hammer SX Hardware Accelerator To Speed Up Verification

Programmable video platform maker to simulate real video streams on Hammer SX

SANTA CLARA, California –June 20, 2006 — Tharas Systems, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance, hardware-assisted verification solutions today announced that Connex Technology, developer of the ConnexArray™ Programmable Video Platform (PVP) has selected Hammer SX to accelerate its functional verification.

"As we implement our massively parallel video processor fabric we needed to verify real video streams - prior to committing the design to silicon. The software simulator route was impractical since it would take 1000s of hours to simulate a few seconds of video frames. The traditional hardware emulation route was expensive and unfeasible. Tharas demonstrated an order of magnitude increase in performance with no change to our verification methodology – all in less than a week," noted Dave Corbin, president & CEO of Connex Technology.

"High Definition Audio Video Coding standards such as H264/MPEG-4 and WM9 demand good quality video at substantially lower bit rates. This puts tremendous burden on chip implementation and verification. Hammer SX and Hammer MX family of hardware accelerators offer an exceptional value at a compelling price/performance point," said Rahm Shastry, president & CEO of Tharas Systems. "We are delighted to be part of Connex Technology’s verification flow."

About Tharas Systems

Tharas Systems develops and markets design verification solutions that lead to a significant shortening of the overall verification cycle of complex integrated circuits and electronic systems design. The pay-off is a demonstrable reduction in time-to-market due to enhanced verification productivity. The recently introduced Hammer SX and Hammer MX products incorporate a patented, multi-core, custom-processor hardware assisted verification engine developed by Tharas that works in conjunction with popular Verilog and VHDL-based software simulators from Synopsys (NASDAQ – SNPS), Cadence Design (NYSE- CDN), and Mentor Graphics (NASDAQ – MENT). The Hammer solution delivers fast compile and accelerated performance without sacrificing ease-of-use and debugging capabilities. Customer installations span the computers, communications, networking, graphics and the video industries.

Founded in 1998, Tharas is privately held with corporate headquarters located in Santa Clara, California, and regional sales and support offices in North America and Japan. Tharas products are distributed through channel partners in Europe, India and Korea. For more information, see the company website, http://www.tharas.com.