PACT XPP Technologies teams with Accent to offer SOC Design Services and Application Platforms for XPP-Based Solutions

Milan, Italy, Munich, Germany June 11th 2002 - Accent, one of the leading providers of electronic design services and platform-level intellectual property (IP), and PACT XPP Technologies, Inc. today announced an agreement targeted at reducing the complexity of system-on-chip (SOC) design, lowering development cost and speeding time-to-market for customers of PACT XPP Technologies' industry-leading reconfigurable processing IP cores. Under the terms of the agreement, Accent will offer a full range of SOC design services and develop application platform solutions for customers using the PACT XPP IP cores.

Accent, with more than 100 design engineers, has expertise in wired and wireless telecommunications, industrial controls, multimedia home automation and automotive applications. In addition to offering a full range of SOC and system level turnkey design services, Accent will develop PACT XPP-based solutions for PACT customers, addressing all the previously mentioned application sectors.

"Today's increasingly complex SOC designs, particularly in telecommunications and multimedia, when coupled with the rapidly evolving silicon technology and with the requirements of very short time-to-market, have created a compelling need for design outsourcing and for the application platform solutions we provide. Accent will help PACT XPP Technologies customers get the most out of their IPs for reconfigurable processing and deliver their products to market faster", said Massimo Vanzi, General Manager of Accent, "By leveraging on high-performance PACT XPP Technologies cores and our proven design expertise, we will give customers the best solutions for their wireless and multimedia applications, as well as a real boost to the image processing community."

"Accent is one of the largest electronic design centers in Europe, with world- class service, quality and design expertise that will help maximize value to our customers on a global basis by enabling them to realize significant productivity and time-to market benefits with their SOC designs", said Eckardt Bihler, CEO of PACT XPP Technologies.

About Accent

Accent is a joint venture incorporated in 1993 between STMicroelectronics (51%), a global leader in the design and manufacture of semiconductors, and Cadence Design Systems (49%), a world leader in software and services for electronic design. Accent is one of the leading providers of electronic design services and platform-level intellectual property (IP), in the field of multimedia applications and low-power general computing. Accent offering includes System on Chip Design, Silicon Implementation, Analog and Mixed Signal Design, IP Reuse.

Additional information is available at www.accent.it.

About PACT XPP Technologies

PACT XPP Technologies is a semiconductor and intellectual property vendor that has developed a unique, wave-reconfigurable architecture that combines the performance of an ASIC with the flexibility of a DSP. PACT has developed the world's most powerful 32-bit processor core as a first implementation on the company' eXtreme Processor Platform (XPP), which has demonstrated performance up to 50X greater than conventional sequential processors and 20 X higher than DSPs. PACT provides XPP cores that can be easily tailored for the next-generation mobile telephones, base stations, workstations and other high-performance devices. More information about PACT XPP Technologies is available at www.pactcorp.com, including a number of detailed white paper on the company's technology.