Tharas Systems announces Axis replacement program

Program to address inevitable product phase-out

SANTA CLARA, Calif. — January 17, 2005 — Tharas Systems, Inc., a leading provider of high-performance, hardware-assisted verification solutions, today announced T-SWAP, Tharas Switch from Axis Products program. T-SWAP is being offered immediately to address the significant concern about the fate of the SpeXtreme / Axis product family, due to the recently announced acquisition of Verisity by Cadence. T-SWAP allows for a low-cost replacement of SpeXtreme / Axis with the custom-processor based Hammer system from Tharas.

The Tharas T-SWAP program is a limited time offer to replace each of the installed SpeXtreme / Axis products with Hammer 100, and provide customers with twice the amount of their currently installed gate capacity. T-SWAP makes Hammer easily affordable to Axis-based design teams; the system is provided free of charge in exchange for a one year Hammer maintenance contract. This offer is good for any Axis hardware, even if it is no longer under maintenance.

"Cadence has rightfully championed processor-based hardware-assisted solutions, due to its fast compile times, and scalability combined with predictable capacity and debug performance. They learned long ago the difficulties of delivering a viable FPGA-based product" said Richard Curtin, Senior VP of marketing and business development. "The Cadence Mercury and MercuryPlus FPGA-based products were discontinued many years ago, due to pronounced issues in the areas of unbearable compile and partitioning times, limited debugging, combined with unpredictable overall design change turnaround times. With T-SWAP, it makes it easy for Axis customers to migrate to our Hammer environment."

Hammer delivers the industry’s fastest compile times, in excess of 50 million RTL gates per hour, and a software-simulator like debug environment that offers complete design visibility. Hammer is a custom-processor architecture with predictable capacity and performance which can be utilized by design and verification teams throughout the RTL development and system validation process.

T-SWAP Contact Information

Axis customers interested in T-SWAP should contact Tharas for further details. For more information, visit http://www.tharas.com/tswap or call Tharas Systems in North America at 408.855.3200. Outside of North America visit http://www.tharas.com/contact for appropriate contact information.

About Tharas Systems

Tharas Systems develops and markets custom processor-based hardware accelerators for system-on-chip design and verification. Its high-performance verification technology leads to significant shortening of the verification cycle and material reduction in time-to-market for designers of complex integrated circuits and electronic systems. Tharas’ custom-processor based hardware-assisted verification solution works in conjunction with popular Verilog and VHDL-based software simulators from Synopsys (NASDAQ – SNPS), Cadence Design (NYSE- CDN), and Mentor Graphics (NASDAQ – MENT). Tharas Systems is located in Santa Clara, California, and has regional sales and support offices in Southern California, Massachusetts, Texas and Japan. Customers include communications, computer, networking and semiconductor companies. For more information visit: http://www.tharas.com.