S2C delivers breakthrough FPGA-Based ESL Design with TAI IP

Plug-and-Play TAI IP™ Interconnect Approach Accelerates Innovation of IP and SoC Time to Market by 3 to 6 months

SAN JOSE, Calif. – May 31, 2005 – S2C, an FPGA-based ESL Design provider, today announced a revolutionary TAI IP technology that promises to accelerate innovation of IP and SoC time to market by 3 to 6 months.  The patent-pending TAI IP (Testable, Analyzable, and Integratable) interconnect technology enables SoCs to be designed using plug-and-play IP modules.  This not only speeds up the design and validation process, but also enables software development to begin concurrently with system design.  In addition, the plug-and-play IP modules are encrypted, giving IP vendors a new freedom to widely distribute IP without fear of reverse engineering.

“Electronic hardware innovation depends on architecture, components, ASSP, IP modules, and SoCs, while software innovation depends on stable hardware and operating environments.  Consequently, prototyping is a must step in the development of any electronic product; it provides an early demo of the hardware innovation to customers and provides an implementation platform for software developers prior to production,” said Thomas Huang, chairman and CEO of S2C Inc.  “The step from concept to prototype hardware must be repeated numerous times during the iterative design process.  We targeted this step as a bottleneck to eliminate since it is just a time-consuming mapping of one representation to another that is unrelated to innovation.  To accelerate innovation, the designer must be able to easily access IP and quickly assemble a prototype that enables hardware and software to work together to demonstrate system functionality.  TAI IP technology and our FPGA-based ESL design solution are the breakthroughs that achieve this objective.  Current beta partners who have applied our technology conservatively estimate a time savings of 3 to 6 months.”

TAI IP technology was developed by S2C co-founders Mr. Huang and Mon-Ren Chene, who serves as vice-president of S2C’s Engineering group.  Both possess over 20 years of design engineering experience and have extensive backgrounds in system design and FPGA-based prototyping.  Prior to founding S2C, Mr. Huang co-founded and was CTO of PIE Design Systems, which later merged with Quickturn Design Systems.  Mr. Huang and Mr. Chene also co-founded Osprey Design Systems, which later merged with Aptix Corporation.

About TAI IP Creation
S2C’s TAI CompilerTM software integrates RTL, test points, transactions, and I/Os to generate an encrypted plug-and-play FPGA-based IP module.  TAI Compiler’s straightforward usability and intuitive interface allow SoC designers and IP providers to effortlessly create their own TAI IP modules and build their own TAI IP libraries.

About IP Porter™ System
The IP Porter system is the world’s first FPGA-based ESL Design platform supporting system design using TAI IP.  The IP Porter system includes TAI-compliant FPGA prototyping hardware and S2C Navigator™ software that configures a TAI IP-based system, and links to SystemC and other standard ESL tools through SCE-MI and C-API.

See S2C at DAC – Booth #144
S2C will be previewing IP Porter and TAI IP technology at the 2005 Design Automation Conference (www.dac.com) in Anaheim, Calif. from June 13-17, 2005.

Availability
The full production releases of the IP Porter system and TAI Compiler software are available now.  The enhanced FPGA-based ESL design flow functionality will be available in IP Porter systems later this year.

About S2C
S2C is the developer and provider of the world's first FPGA-based ESL Design Platform — utilizing an FPGA-based IP format that accelerates and streamlines the system-on-chip (SoC) design flow to perform architecture design, secure IP evaluation, plug-and-play IP integration, system validation, and pre-silicon prototyping.  S2C's advanced capabilities are driven by proprietary TAI IP technology, which renders encrypted FPGA-based IP models Testable, Analyzable, and Integratable, and therefore treatable as library components in electronic system level (ESL) environments.  Combined with S2C's professional services in building SoC prototypes and validation environments, customers can attain a more seamless design flow — accelerating innovation from concept to demo by 3 to 6 months.  Founded by a group of industry professionals with extensive system and prototyping experience, S2C is headquartered in San Jose, California and has a regional office and engineering design center in Shanghai, China.  For more information, visit www.s2cinc.com.

# # #

S2C, TAI, TAI IP, TAI Compiler, IP Porter are trademarks of S2C Inc.  All other tradenames and trademarks are the property of their respective owners.