Frontier Design raises $9 Million in new funding from private investors.

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE

May 29, 2000, LEUVEN, BELGIUM — Frontier Design today announced that it has secured $9 million in second round financing from a group of private investors located in the Netherlands. The same group of investors, Silverline, Ltd., also has invested an undisclosed amount in a startup company that will develop and commercialize products based on Frontier Design’s speech related intellectual property and cores. In connection with these investments, Silverline’s managing director, Mr. Cees Heikamp, will join Frontier Design’s board of directors.

" We have been a customer of Frontier Design for more than a year now" said Mr. Heikamp . "All the way we have been impressed by the professionalism of Frontier’s management and by the high quality work the company has performed for us. We also realized that Frontier’s approach to build a balanced business on EDA tools, Silicon IP and Design Services has a lot of potential for financial growth. I am very pleased that, after our investment, I will be able to help Frontier with the further successful implementation of this plan."

Frontier Design will use the funds to increase its R&D, sales and marketing efforts. Herman Beke, Frontier’s CEO said, "Up to now, Frontier has invested heavily in the creation of its C-to-Silicon^TM design methodology, the A|RT^TM family of EDA tools supporting the methodology, and a growing portfolio of IP-cores, developed with the methodology and the tools. This R&D effort has

culminated in the recent release of A|RT Designer, our cutting edge architectural synthesis tool that helps the designer to transform a system, described in the C-language, into an optimized hardware architecture and then automatically generates RT-level VHDL or Verilog for that architecture.

"Now we want to focus on making our EDA customers more productive in their preferred design flows," Beke added. "We will create three "tiger" teams at our EDA development facility in Leuven, Belgium. One team will be assigned to accelerate the integration of A|RT Designer in a SystemC based hardware/software co-design flow. The other two teams will each be assigned the task of improving the efficiency of our tools Xilinx and Altera FPGA design flows respectively.

"In addition to R&D investments, we also will focus more on the commercial aspects of the business. As a starter, we intend to vastly increase our marketing and sales effort in the US. We are planning to increase our world-wide headcount by about 50% in the next six to nine months. We are actively seeking sales and marketing people to join our dynamic organization. I hereby invite anyone who is interested to contact us as soon as possible."

About Frontier Design

Frontier Design was founded in 1997 to develop a next generation system level design methodology called A|RT (Algorithm to Register Transfer) and to sell innovative EDA products, complex intellectual property cores and design services based on this methodology. A|RT EDA tools start from a specification in the C-language. They are used by Verilog or VHDL hardware designers to improve design productivity and design quality, in terms of product cost, power consumption and performance. The A|RT design methodology supports existing system-level design flows provided by companies such as Cadence Design Systems (NYSE: CDN), Mentor Graphics (NASDAQ: MENT), Synopsys (NASDAQ: SNPS), and by offering a quick and easy path from the C-language to Verilog or VHDL.

System-level IP cores offered by Frontier Design include low bit-rate speech-compression, high performance, low-cost echo cancellation and others, as well as speech recognition and synthesis.

Frontier Design sells its tools, IP and design services from its facilities in California; Florida; Leuven, Belgium; Tiel, The Netherlands; Tokyo, Japan; and through a growing number of distributors and representatives in North America, Europe, Japan, and the Pacific Rim.

Frontier Design’s World Wide Web site is http://www.frontierd.com . Please email inquiries to info@frontierd.com
 

Contacts:

Herman Beke Nancy B. Green
Frontier Design The William Baldwin Group
+32 16 39 14 11 +1 650 856 6192
herman_beke@frontierd.com nbg@william-baldwin.com