Aptix Unveils Sophisticated ASIC Verification and Pre-Silicon Prototyping Environment Supporting NEC Electronics' 32-Bit Embedded Microcontroller Core

Aptix Prototype Studio and System Explorer Now Support NEC Electronics' Popular V850E1 Microcontroller Core to Speed Development of Complex ASIC/SoC-Based Designs

SANTA CLARA and SAN JOSE, Calif., January 6, 2003 - NEC Electronics America, Inc. and Aptix Corporation today announced the availability of a pre-silicon prototyping environment that supports NEC Electronics' 32-bit V850E1™ embedded microcontroller core. The new solution provides system designers of complex ASIC/SoC designs with a ready-made solution that enables customers to develop full prototypes of their systems in an affordable and efficient way. To reduce overall design turnaround times, the new pre-silicon prototyping environment provides high-speed emulation capabilities for the verification, integration and validation of intellectual property and software in V850E1-based SoC designs. As a mutual customer of Aptix and NEC Electronics America, Dotcast Inc., a provider of broadband media delivery and management services, played a key role in the development of the ready-made system prototyping platform.

Tom Cowling, engineering program manager at Dotcast, said, "The DNTSC-100 is Dotcast's SoC dNTSC demodulator. This ASIC demodulates digital data from an ordinary NTSC television signal at data rates up to approximately three megabits per second. The DNTSC-100 is the enabling technology for a last-mile solution to high-speed delivery of mass media services. Using the FPGA implementation of the V850E1 core integrated with the rest of our design in a pre-silicon prototype on an Aptix® System Explorer™ platform enabled us to validate our design at speeds one million times faster than software simulation."

"Customers developing ASIC designs based on NEC Electronics' popular V850E1 microcontroller core can quickly realize high-speed emulation capabilities with Aptix's ready-made prototyping solution," said Steve Ikei, senior engineering manager, microcontroller strategic business unit, NEC Electronics America, Inc. "Before taking a multi-million gate ASIC design to silicon, it is crucial to validate the design at near real-time speeds. By partnering with Aptix, our customers can test their solutions in real-world environments and make any necessary adjustments in minimal time."

Richard Newell, director of consulting services at Aptix, added, "Our customers benefit tremendously from being able to run full designs at or near real-time speed before actual silicon is available. With the availability of FPGA-ready code for the NEC Electronics' V850E1 core, we have dramatically cut the time to real-time validation for our customers who use this core in their products."

The prototyping platform for the V850E1 microcontroller core is available from Aptix as a "pre-mapped" code module for the Xilinx® Virtex™-E family of high-performance field-programmable gate array (FPGA) devices. This code module is available to Aptix customers who are also NEC Electronics V850E1 licensees. The code module may be used with Aptix System Explorer prototype validation platforms, Aptix Software Integration Stations™ or with Aptix Prototype Studio/PCB™ for development of a custom, hard-wired pre-silicon prototype printed circuit board.

The V850E1core is an NEC Electronics proprietary 32-bit embedded RISC microcontroller designed for embedded real-time applications for communications, computer, consumer, automotive, commercial and industrial products. The V850E1 microcontroller core employs four sets of independent data buses with instruction and data cache memory. This unique bus architecture provides 143 million instructions per second (MIPS) at 100-megahertz (MHz) system operation.

Pricing and Availability
Xilinx Virtex-E FPGA-ready code for the NEC Electronics V850E1 microcontroller core is available from Aptix now at a price of $12,500. Price and availability are subject to change.

About Aptix
Aptix Corporation is a leading provider of high-performance pre-silicon prototype (PSP) solutions to System-on-Chip (SoC) developers, enabling them to accelerate their time-to-market, reduce costs and improve their product performance. Aptix's reconfigurable and portable PSPs enable hardware developers to integrate custom logic and to verify and debug complex SoC designs in a real-world environment and software developers to accelerate the firmware and application software development timeline. In addition, these flexible prototypes can be deployed for field-testing and to multiple customers for evaluation, providing a development head start. Visit Aptix on the web at http://www.aptix.com. Aptix is headquartered at 1338 Ridder Park Drive, San Jose, CA 95131.

About NEC Electronics America, Inc.
NEC Electronics America, Inc., headquartered in Santa Clara, California, is a wholly owned subsidiary of NEC Electronics Corporation, a leading provider of semiconductor products encompassing advanced technology solutions for the broadband and communications markets; system solutions for the mobile, PC, automotive and digital consumer markets; and platform solutions for a wide range of customer applications. NEC Electronics America offers solutions ranging from standard products to system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions, customized products for next-generation designs, a local manufacturing facility in Roseville, California, and the global manufacturing capabilities of its parent company. NEC Electronics America is also the exclusive sales supplier of NEC active-matrix LCD and PDP modules in North America. More information about the products offered by NEC Electronics America, Inc. can be found at http://www.necelam.com.

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NEC Electronics America, Inc. and V850E1 are either registered trademarks or trademarks of NEC Electronics Corporation in the United States and/or other countries. Aptix is a registered trademark of Aptix Corporation. System Explorer, Aptix Prototype Studio/PCB and Aptix Software Integration Stations are trademarks of Aptix Corporation. Xilinx is a registered trademark and Virtex is a trademark of Xilinx, Inc. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are property of their respective owners. (NEC Electronics America, Inc. #11057)