Pro Design Announces PCI Express Kit for High-Speed ASIC Prototyping System

New PCI Express kit accelerates ASIC design verification for PCI Express development program

Munich/SAN JOSE, April 7, 2006 - Pro Design, a leading supplier of high-speed ASIC and SoC verification platforms, today announced the availability of the PCI Express Kit for its ASIC prototyping system CHIPit Platinum Edition.

"Complex PCI Express based ASIC designs typically require verification with a real PCI Express interface. For this reason, we developed the PCI Express kit for our flagship prototyping system, CHIPit Platinum Edition. This new feature is already successfully in use at some customers," said Gunnar Scholl, Director of Marketing and Business Development at Pro Design.

The new CHIPit PCI Express kit consists of a PCI Express Rocket IO board and a PCI Express Interface Board. The board directly connects to the extension slots of the CHIPit Platinum Edition. It is assembled with a Xilinx Virtex-II Pro FPGA, a JTAG debug connector and a RS232 interface, and supports a 1-lane or 4-lane PCI Express interface. The board is easily integrated into the CHIPit Platinum Edition and connects to the CHIPit Platinum global signals and clock distribution network. In addition to the PCI Express Rocket IO extension board, the kit includes two PCI Express Interface Boards, which support four lanes (PCI Express x4) and one lane (PCI Express x1). A high-speed cable connects the interface board to the PCI Express Rocket IO extension board. Furthermore, the PCI Express Rocket IO board provides one regular PHX extension board slot and a general purpose Rocket IO extension board slot to support other GBit interfaces like SATA, GBit Ethernet etc.
The PCI Express board can be used as a plug-in card or to plug a PCI Express add-in card in it, providing the user with a flexible PCI Express Kit that can be tailored to meet his specific PCI Express development requirements.

"We are very proud that our engineering team was able to create a high-speed PCI Express Kit which solves many of our customers' critical verification challenges. With this new feature, CHIPit Platinum users can dramatically reduce verification time." stated Heiko Mauersberger", CTO of Pro Design.

About Pro Design
The privately held company was founded in 1981 and has over 80 employees, with various facilities for research, design, and sales in Germany, France and the U.S. ProDesign has more than twenty-four years of experience as a service provider and manufacturer in the electronics industry. The company's products and services include the CHIPit family of High-Speed ASIC Prototyping Systems to validate algorithm performance, verify hardware implementation, and assist in hardware/software co-development and co-verification to reduce the verification time dramatically. For more information about the company's prototyping products, please visit: http://www.uchipit.com.

About Verific Design Automation
Verific Design Automation was founded in 1999 by electronic design automation (EDA) industry veteran Rob Dekker. It develops and sells C++ source code-based SystemVerilog, Verilog and VHDL front ends - parsers, analyzers and elaborators - as well as a generic hierarchical netlist database for EDA applications. Verific's technology has been licensed in many applications, combined shipping more than 45,000 end-user copies. Corporate headquarters is located at: 1516 Oak Street, Suite 115, Alameda, Calif. 94501. Telephone: (510) 522-1555. Facsimile number: (510) 522-1553. Email: info@verific.com Website: http://www.verific.com.