The SPIRIT Consortium Expands Worldwide Membership with New System Integrators and IP Supply-Chain Providers

ARC, Freescale, Infineon, and Yogitech join The SPIRIT Consortium

SAN JOSE, Nov. 18, 2005 - The SPIRIT Consortium, a global organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design, today announced that four new companies have joined The Consortium: ARC International, Freescale Semiconductor Inc., Infineon Technologies AG, and YOGITECH.

"The SPIRIT Consortium is excited to welcome its new members," said Ralph von Vignau, Chair of The SPIRIT Consortium. "They, along with our other members, will be influential in guiding future developments and ensuring comprehensive validation of the specifications in real design flows. With the addition of these respected companies, the SPIRIT Consortium now lists 38 leading IP, system integration, and EDA companies as members."

The Consortium members are committed to making their IP and IP tools interoperable through SPIRIT Consortium specifications. Strengthened with the addition of these companies, The Consortium is providing the multi-vendor integration requirements that help ensure efficiency and rapid adoption of its specification. As The SPIRIT Consortium specification is adopted, integrated device manufacturers will benefit from faster time-to-market and IP integration by incorporating the standard into their flows.

System Integrators
Freescale intends to be involved in The Consortium's development working groups. "The SPIRIT Consortium's IP metadata descriptions complement the metadata already in use within Freescale," said Chekib Akrout, vice president, Design Technology, Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. "The SPIRIT Consortium enables an open industry metadata standard that will help facilitate data exchange with our partners and streamline our IP integration procedures."

Infineon has been accepted as a contributing member. "An efficient employment of IP modules is based on a tool automation that in turn requires standards for IP packaging. The specifications developed by The SPIRIT Consortium are seen as a key enabler to accomplish this. Hence, joining The Consortium is a natural expansion of Infineon's design strategy," explained Albert Stritter, vice president, Design Automation of Infineon Technologies. "Infineon views IP-based design, at both the RTL level as well as at the transaction level, to be the most promising strategy to obtain demanded productivity improvement and design time reduction without any loss of product quality."

Supply-Chain Providers
The SPIRIT Consortium specifications will ensure that IP providers can supply IP in a way that facilitates automatic integration.

"Using ARC's ARChitect Processor Configurator tool, an SoC designer can rapidly create a customized ARC processor core optimized for their application," said Peter Hutton, senior vice president/general manager of SoC Engineering, ARC International. "Using the standard methods of IP description which The SPIRIT Consortium is driving to help link ARChitect to the SoC design flow will provide significant benefits for our customers."

"We have been looking with much interest to the activity carried out in The Spirit Consortium during the last couple of years and we are now very excited and proud to become a member. We are looking forward to bringing into The Consortium our strong expertise in the implementation and licensing of verification components; but, on top of it, we are also strongly motivated to apply The Consortium specifications to a new IP catalogue we are developing and that will be made available during 2006 specifically to safety critical applications," said Silvano Motto, CEO of YOGITECH.

About the Consortium
The SPIRIT Consortium is a global organization focused on establishing multi-faceted IP/tool integration standards that drive sustainable growth in electronic design. It is comprised of companies dedicated to the adoption of a unified set of specifications for configuring, integrating, and verifying IP in advanced SoC design tool sets. The Consortium is comprised of leading EDA, IP, system integration, and semiconductor companies. For more information on The SPIRIT Consortium and its goals, please visit www.spiritconsortium.org.

About the Companies
ARC International is the world leader in low-power, high-performance 32-bit configurable CPU/DSP processor cores, subsystems, real-time operating systems and development tools for embedded system design. ARC's patented configurable CPU technology assists customers in the development of next generation digital media, consumer and communications devices, resulting in lower cost, higher performance SoC products. ARC International maintains a worldwide presence with corporate offices in San Jose, California, USA and Elstree, UK. The company has research and development offices located in England and the United States. For more information please visit the ARC website at: www.ARC.com. ARC International is listed on the London Stock Exchange as ARC International plc (LSE: ARK).

Freescale Semiconductor, Inc. (NYSE:FSL, FSL.B) is a global leader in the design and manufacture of embedded semiconductors for the automotive, consumer, industrial, networking and wireless markets. Freescale became a publicly traded company in July 2004 after more than 50 years as part of Motorola, Inc. The company is based in Austin, Texas, and has design, research and development, manufacturing or sales operations in more than 30 countries. Freescale, a member of the S&P 500®, is one of the world's largest semiconductor companies with 2004 sales of $5.7 billion (USD). www.freescale.com

Infineon Technologies AG, Munich, Germany, offers semiconductor and system solutions for automotive, industrial and multimarket sectors, for applications in communication, as well as memory products. With a global presence, Infineon operates through its subsidiaries in the US from San Jose, CA, in the Asia-Pacific region from Singapore and in Japan from Tokyo. In fiscal year 2004 (ending September), the company achieved sales of Euro 7.19 billion with about 35,600 employees worldwide. Infineon is listed on the DAX index of the Frankfurt Stock Exchange and on the New York Stock Exchange (ticker symbol: IFX). Further information is available at www.infineon.com.

YOGITECH is a company with proven experience in System-on-Chip, Mixed-Signal design&verification and in fault-tolerant integrated circuits. Founded in 2000, YOGITECH is leveraging a unique expertise in Specman Elite. Sponsor Member of OCP-IP, YOGITECH is active member of the OpenChoice Partnership and of the Verification Alliance with Cadence, Member of the Spirit Consortium and ARM Technology Access Partner.

YOGITECH offers a catalogue of eRM Verification Components to shorten time-to production of IPs and systems based on standard protocols like OCP, ATAPI, CAN and LIN. Nowadays, some of the world main leaders in the semiconductor industry rely on YOGITECH's solutions and services.