CoWare to Enter Licensing and Technical Support Agreement with Sony To Speed Chip Design for Sony's Next-Generation AV-IT Products

Tokyo, JAPAN - January 25, 2000 - CoWare[tm], Inc. today announced that it will enter into a licensing and technical support agreement with Sony Corporation to build Sony's system-on-a-chip (SoC) design environment using the company's CoWare N2C[tm] system design tool. By implementing CoWare's design tool into Sony's SoC design flow, overall chip design time is to be shortened drastically; enabling Sony to accelerate the introduction of its next-generation Audio Video-Information Technology (AV-IT) products to meet the ever-quickening market demand.

 Under the terms of the agreement, CoWare will license its CoWare N2C system design tool to Sony and provide technical support to create an efficient SoC design flow. Sony will provide development direction and early software product feedback to CoWare for software enhancements and implementation.

 CoWare's system-level design tool, CoWare N2C[tm], provides a proven methodology to go from an idea to a system specification that can be modeled and tested extensively before costly chip implementation. Moreover, to efficiently partition various SoC functions into hardware processing and software processing, CoWare N2C offers Interface Synthesis[tm] technology to facilitate the cost/performance/power optimization. Also, CoWare N2C software is capable of debugging designs at the system level, where it is much easier to make changes.

 "Leadership in getting complex SoC designs to market quickly for next-generation AV-IT products is of critical importance to Sony," said Eiichi Yura, President, Platform SoC Solution Center, Sony Corporation. "As we've worked with CoWare, we've found that system-level design technology and methodology has had a major impact on the way we design and has reduced our design cycle time dramatically. We were particularly impressed by the time savings available with CoWare's Interface Synthesis technology, which automates the time-consuming tasks of writing the hardware and software interfaces to a chosen processor architecture."

 "Working with Sony gives us an incredible opportunity to learn about the demands of system-level, SoC designs for high-performance AV-IT products, and then integrate their knowledge back into the further development of our tools," stated CoWare President and CEO, Guido Arnout.

CoWare, Inc., founded in 1996, provides tools and methodologies that help engineering teams cut their system-on-a-chip design times in half. CoWare N2CÔ provides an efficient means to capture, analyze, and implement a system specification, with parallel development by hardware and software teams. In addition, CoWare N2C greatly enhances IP re-use and selection, further reducing design time. The CoWare N2C software is employed by major systems and semiconductor companies including Alcatel, Fujitsu, Hitachi, Matsushita, Mitsubishi, Motorola, NEC, Nokia, Sony and ST Microelectronics. For more information, visit www.CoWare.com.
 

Interface Synthesis, CoWare and CoWare N2C are trademarks of CoWare, Inc. Sony is a registered trademark of Sony Corporation.