Sonics and White Eagle Collabration Yields Advanced "Off-The-Shelf" SOC Prototyping Platform That Reduces SOC Verification Time

Mountain View, Calif. - January 5, 2004 - White Eagle Systems Technology, Inc., the independent leader in advanced prototyping technology, and Sonics, Inc., a leading provider of SOC (system-on-chip) architectures and SMART Interconnect IP products, today announced the immediate availability of SwordFish, a new SOC prototyping system from White Eagle based on Sonics' SMART Interconnect IP. The new White Eagle SwordFish SOC Prototyping System will dramatically cut the time required to verify complex SOCs using Sonics Interconnect IP by providing an off-the-shelf prototyping platform that can be quickly and easily reconfigured to support many different SOC designs and derivatives. White Eagle will sell and support SwordFish and provide its prototyping tool suite and training and premium support services. Sonics provides the SMART Interconnect IP that enables precise design partitioning and predictability.

"Our new SwordFish system is the first member of our prototyping product family to leverage Sonics SiliconBackplane™ SMART Interconnect IP technology to produce high speed, 40 million gate SOCs," said Jim Tobias, president and CEO of White Eagle. "We are extremely pleased to collaborate with Sonics in producing this ground-breaking technology. Sonics has been a leader in recognizing the importance of standard on-chip protocols as a way to accelerate complex SOC design flows. White Eagle is the leader in cost-effective prototyping platforms. The result of this collaboration will benefit all users of Sonics technology by decreasing the time and resources spent in design verification and also provides a time-to-market advantage."

“This new advanced prototyping system will reduce the time and effort required to fully verify complex SOC designs," said Grant Pierce, president and CEO of Sonics. “This is one of the biggest problems in developing complex SOCs, an effort that can easily run into the tens of millions of dollars. SwordFish provides features that have been requested by our customers who want to perform prototyping from the beginning of their design cycle. Both Sonics and White Eagle see the opportunity to serve our customers with a prototyping system based on SiliconBackplane™ SMART Interconnect IP. SwordFish is a valuable tool that will help our customers accelerate their complex SOC designs and reduce design costs."

SOC design teams require prototyping to provide a thorough testing environment before costly design tape out. Prototyping greatly cuts development time and costs because it provides to the software team a hardware-based development and verification platform months before the final chip is complete. White Eagle's SwordFish System provides users a cost effective, off-the-shelf, flexible platform that can be easily configured for different SOC designs and their follow-on derivatives. This has become an important feature as OEMs struggle to amortize chip design costs over multiple design variations and seek to provide a family of differentiated products based on a core design.

“With their knowledge of prototyping and verification methodologies, and experience in developing protocol-centric verification components, White Eagle is well-positioned to deliver solid solutions that break the prototyping bottleneck," said David P. Lautzenheiser, Vice President of Marketing at Sonics. “This new prototyping technology promises to help accelerate verification schedules and speed the development cycle of complex SOCs."

Sonics SMART Interconnect IP family of products, including SiliconBackplane™, enables SOC design teams to develop complex designs faster with less risk. Sonics SMART Interconnect IP connects complex IP blocks such as microprocessors, DSPs, hardware accelerators such as MPEG, DMA or packet processors with any other IP block with a high degree of silicon efficiency and high data throughput.

Pricing and Availability
A complete SwordFish datasheet can be found on the White Eagle Website at http://www.whiteeagle.us. The pricing for an 8 million ASIC gate prototyping system is less than $100,000. Please contact White Eagle for specific pricing and system configuration options. White Eagle also offers full methodology training and premium support services for its SwordFish Prototyping System.

About White Eagle Systems Technology
White Eagle Systems Technology is the leading independent prototyping system company offering a rich prototyping methodology, consulting, and training services. By leveraging its deep experience in networking, processor/SOC, and communication designs, White Eagle creates prototyping product solutions that solve the challenging functional verification problems. For more information see www.whiteeagle.us. White Eagle is headquartered in San Jose, California.

About Sonics, Inc.
Sonics, Inc. is a leading provider of SOC architectures and SMART Interconnect Intellectual Property (IP) that accelerate the development of complex SOCs, reduce development costs and increase the reusability of IP. Major semiconductor and systems companies including Broadcom, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Toshiba have applied Sonics architectures, IP products and methodologies in SOCs used in leading products in the wireless, digital consumer and communications markets. Sonics customers have experienced dramatic reduction in time to market, from years to months, while enjoying savings in design and manufacturing costs. Sonics is a privately held company funded by Investar Capital, Smart Technology Ventures, TL Ventures, Easton Hunt Capital, JAFCO Ventures, and H&Q Asia-Pacific. For more information, see www.sonicsinc.com.