ProDesign's CHIPit Verification System Selected by Micronas for Complex Consumer SoC Designs

Increasing System Sales Validates ProDesign's High-Speed Prototyping Concept SAN JOSE, Calif. & MUNICH, Germany--Dec. 19, 2005--ProDesign, a leading supplier of high-speed ASIC and SoC verification platforms, today announced that it has sold its 150th CHIPit system. Long-term customer Micronas, a semiconductor designer and manufacturer with worldwide operations, will use the newest CHIPit product - the CHIPit Gold Edition Pro - to verify their complex HDTV SoC designs. This is considered clear proof of the market acceptance of the company's High-Speed Prototyping systems.

Micronas and many other customers decided to use CHIPit as their design verification methodology because of the flexible and versatile field of applications of the system. The platform gives design engineers unprecedented speed and flexibility to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation and assist in hardware/ software co-development and co-verification, reducing the verification time dramatically.

Dirk Wieberneit, Vice President Product Development Consumer Products at Micronas said: "We purchased ProDesign's CHIPit Gold Edition Pro to verify our newest generation of highly complex system-on-chip (SoC) designs for the HDTV market with numerous external system interfaces and demanding image processing algorithms. The new system's performance and stability impressed us. We were able to successfully run all tests with our design at highest speed. This helped us not only to significantly reduce our verification time but to save costs."

Wieberneit continued: "ProDesign is a reliable partner for our verification methodology, therefore we collaborate very closely. Three years ago we implemented CHIPit for the first time, and it has proved a valuable extension of our verification strategy for today's and future developments."

Since the launch of the product line in 2001, Micronas has been using CHIPit to verify cutting-edge IC and sensor system solutions for consumer electronics.

"To verify our SoC designs, we searched for a methodology that allowed us to run it in real-time. In CHIPit, we found a system that met our demands of speed and stability," explained Dirk Wieberneit and continued: "CHIPit enables us to verify our complex, elaborate algorithms for image improvement in real-time. Thus we make sure that the first prototypes already achieve the fully developed image quality that our customers can expect from Micronas."

Background information

The idea of ProDesign's concept of High Speed ASIC/SoC Prototyping systems arose about 4 years ago in 2001 when the company established a separate business unit for the development of high-quality, open and reusable prototyping systems which should fulfill the highest demands of ASIC & SoC designers. With more than twenty-four years of experience as a service provider especially in the development and production of High-Speed PCB designs, the company had received more and more requests to develop customized FPGA boards which should serve as prototypes for ASIC or SoC designs. The customers' requirements for these kind of boards where highest quality, the goal to achieve highest system frequency and run the ASIC design near or in real-time. The increasing number of these requests confirmed ProDesign's own market analysis - that there was a market for standard and reusable prototyping systems.

Over the last three years ProDesign has also developed a complete software environment which allows an easy and comfortable handling of the company's hardware, now offering an integrated set of tools with debug capabilities that provide a dual solution for hardware and software verification.

Gunnar Scholl, Director Marketing and Business Development of ProDesign concludes: "Our focus is to bring high quality systems to market which enable ASIC and SoC designers to verify their designs in the highest possible speed. The rapidly growing number of CHIPit customer confirms the market acceptance of our High-Speed Rapid-Prototyping concept and shows us, that we are on the right way."

About ProDesign

The privately held company was founded in 1981 and has over 80 employees, with various facilities for research, design, and sales in Germany, France and the U.S. ProDesign has more than twenty-four years of experience as a service provider and manufacturer in the electronics industry. The company's products and services include the CHIPit family of hardware-assisted verification tools to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation, and assist in hardware/software co-development and co-verification to reduce the verification time dramatically. For more information about the company's prototyping products, please visit: http://www.uchipit.com.