Nuvation Certified to Provide Design Support for Stratix GX OEMs Extending Strategic Alliance With Altera

SAN JOSE, CA--(MARKET WIRE)--Mar 18, 2004 -- Nuvation, a leading Silicon Valley electronics design services (EDS) firm, today announced that it is now qualified by Altera Corporation, the world's pioneer in system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions, to offer high-speed design consulting to Altera Original Equipment Manufacturers (OEMs) working with the new Altera Stratix GX FPGA family. This qualification extends the scope of the multi-year strategic alliance between the two companies. Nuvation was certified a member of the Altera MegaFunction Partner Program (AMPP) and an Altera Certified Design Center (CDC) in 2002.

Carrying forward the concept of integrated transceiver technology first brought to the FPGA industry by Altera, Stratix GX devices include up to 20 full duplex transceiver channels, each capable of operating at up to 3.125 Gbps per channel while consuming minimal power. Designing with clock speeds in the multiple-gigahertz range introduces new challenges for FPGA and board-level designs. Many OEMs are reluctant to add additional engineering staff or find a scarcity of qualified high-speed/RF design engineers. Altera has taken the pain out of this process by certifying the top high-speed design centers worldwide and providing these centers with advanced Stratix GX training, development kits, and reference designs.

"As an established EDS firm for high-speed imaging and communications, Nuvation is regarded throughout the industry as one of the top high-speed design centers in North America. In 2002, we promoted Nuvation to Certified Design Center (CDC) status for their advanced technical expertise and their successful track record with our customers. We are pleased to expand this alliance with them with this certification qualifying them to support on Stratix GX designs for our customers worldwide," said David Greenfield, Sr. Director of Product Marketing.

Nuvation provides Electronic Design Services including FPGA design, board design, and Signal Integrity Analysis consulting. Electronic Design Services has become a significant growth industry as companies have downsized and are reluctant to add full-time staff. Furthermore, many design architectures are advancing from high-speed parallel architectures such as PCI-X (64 bit, 66MHz) to the new serial-based architectures such as PCI-Express (4 channel, 2.5 GHz). This represents resourcing challenges for OEMs that require RF electronics expertise and specialized tools to implement these new architectures.

"At circuit speeds above 1 GHz, hardware design changes from digital electronics to RF/analog. This requires a unique skill set and specialized design tools that most companies today do not possess. Moreover, design errors at these speeds are difficult to analyze and typically require expensive board re-spins," stated Michael Worry, CEO of Nuvation. "Nuvation engineers have designed systems up to 24 GHz and we have tools to support designs up to 40 GHz. We have already completed high-speed designs with Altera's new Stratix GX chips and are looking forward to supporting additional Altera OEMs through this continuing partnership."

About Nuvation

Nuvation is a leading Electronics Design Services (EDS) firm that provides project-based FPGA, board, and firmware design service, Intellectual Property cores, and Signal Integrity Analysis consulting for the embedded systems industry. Nuvation provides engineering services to a variety of industries including Datacom/Telecom, Wireless, Digital Video/Multimedia, Defense/Aerospace/Homeland Security, Consumer Electronics, and Semiconductors. More information is available at www.nuvation.com.

NUVATION is a registered trademark of Nuvation Research Corporation. All other company and product names may be trademarks of the company with which they are associated.