Universities Adopt CoWare Processor Designer as Teaching and Research Tool

More than 40 Research Institutes Use CoWare Processor Designer to Teach Students and to Conduct Research About Application-Specific Processor Architecture Design

SAN JOSE, Calif. – September 17, 2008 -- CoWare^®, Inc., the leading supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services, announced today that universities worldwide are adopting CoWare Processor Designer for teaching application-specific processor architecture in graduate student classes and for advanced research. The use of CoWare Processor Designer for education purpose provides commercial companies’ access to a highly-trained and knowledgeable workforce as well as the ability to transfer research knowledge into commercial applications.

Application Specific Instruction-set Processor (ASIP) usage is growing rapidly in a wide variety of industries ranging from consumer electronics to wireless, where cost, performance and power consumption measurements are the most critical decisions that need to be made in new application areas such as automotive, industrial automation and networking security.

CoWare Processor Designer provides the flexibility to explore a design space far beyond the extensions of existing processor cores and allows the breaking of traditional models and paradigms of computer architectures. With its automated generation of fast, cycle-accurate models for performance analysis and its automated path-to-silicon cost, performance, and power consumption, CoWare Processor Designer enables exploration of new architectures quickly and the ability to confirm area, power consumption and performance numbers quickly.

“CoWare Processor Designer allows us to implement application-specific instruction set processors for channel decoding in wireless systems with an extremely high productivity and performance which is close to that of dedicated IP blocks,” said Prof. Norbert Wehn, Architectures for Wireless Communication Systems, TU Kaiserslautern. “The offered flexibility of Processor Designer with respect to pipeline and memory organization is essential for our application.”

“This year we offered an application-specific processor design course for graduate students for the first time,” said Professor Pierre Langlois from École Polytechnique de Montréal. “Gaining practical experience with Architecture Description Languages such as LISA and with design tools such as CoWare’s Processor Designer is now an essential part of computer engineering education at the undergraduate and graduate levels.”

“The need for ASIPs is growing rapidly across a wide range of applications. Commercial companies need access to a trained and knowledgeable workforce, powerful automated development tools and the ability to leverage ongoing research,” said Marc Serughetti, vice president of marketing and business development at CoWare. “Working jointly with more than 40 universities and research institutes gives our commercial customers an easier path to efficiently deploy the power of CoWare Processor Designer for their ASIP development needs.”

About CoWare
CoWare is the leading global supplier of platform-driven electronic system-level (ESL) design software and services. IP, semiconductor, and electronics companies use CoWare ESL 2.0 solutions to design better processor- and software-intensive products faster. CoWare solutions solve the new design challenges associated with platform architecture design, platform verification, application sub-system design, processor design, DSP algorithm design, and software development, and are based on open industry standards including SystemC. These solutions also enable IP and semiconductor companies to implement more effective go-to-market strategies. CoWare's corporate investors include ARM [(LSE: ARM); (NASDAQ: ARMHY)], Cadence Design Systems (NASDAQ: CDNS), STMicroelectronics (NYSE: STM), and Sony Corporation (NYSE: SNE). CoWare is headquartered in San Jose, Calif., and has offices around the world. For more information about CoWare and its products and services, visit http://www.coware.com.