Argon Design Through its Partner ChipStart Licenses HEVC/H.265 Streams Technology to Advanced Micro Devices

MARKHAM, Ontario & CAMBRIDGE, England-- March 05, 2014 --Argon Design, Inc., a leading supplier of advanced video verification solutions, has announced the licensing of their Streams and Coverage Tool to Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (“AMD”), a leading global semiconductor company. AMD will use Argon’s technology to validate its video decoder design and ensure that its designs are fully compatible with the latest HEVC video compression specification.

Argon Streams is a comprehensive set of test bit-streams that are generated directly from the HEVC specification. This technique avoids duplicating any subtle errors or ambiguities that are present in the HEVC reference code.

The companion Coverage Tool provides a detailed view of which equations, values, symbols and parameters of HEVC have been tested by Argon Streams. By measuring the coverage of the specification, Argon Streams has been optimized to reduce the size and number of test bit-streams, which in turn drastically reduces simulation time, while still providing full and demonstrable coverage of all aspects of the specification.

“Using Argon Streams as an element of our HEVC decoder verification strategy has helped AMD to build a high confidence that our decoder design is fully compatible with the HEVC specifications,” said Gordon Kerr, Director of Multimedia IP at AMD. “Argon’s novel approach helps to provide comprehensive verification coverage in an efficient manner, accelerating time-to-market for our next generation high performance ultra-low power decoder designs.”

Alan Scott, CEO of Argon Design says, “AMD has been an ideal customer for us. At their suggestion, we have been able to add several additional features in to Argon Streams to enhance their effectiveness.”

About AMD

Advanced Micro Devices, Inc. (NYSE: AMD) designs and integrates technology that powers millions of intelligent devices, including personal computers, tablets, game consoles and cloud servers that define the new era of surround computing. AMD solutions enable people everywhere to realize the full potential of their favorite devices and applications to push the boundaries of what is possible.

For more information, visit www.amd.com.

About Argon Design

Argon Design Ltd. is a leading provider of HEVC/H.265 design solutions and are based in Cambridge, United Kingdom. As a design services company specializing in video and multimedia systems, Argon Design have developed industry standard compliance test suites, Argon Streams and Coverage Tool to meet the demanding needs of many major IC providers and OEMs.

For more information, visit http://www.argondesign.com/.

About ChipStart

ChipStart is a semiconductor intellectual property and design services company based in Palo Alto, California. ChipStart provides sales, marketing, and design support engagement solutions for companies that commerce third party semiconductor intellectual property, high quality pre-verified subsystem solutions, and support design services for ASIC and fabless semiconductor companies. ChipStart solutions are used as critical components of communications, consumer and computing products including switches, routers, modems, cellular phones, set-top boxes, HDTVs, DVD players and PCs. For more information, see www.chip-start.com.