TransEDA Acquires Verification IP Company

LONDON and LOS GATOS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Mar. 19, 2001-- TransEDA PLC today announced the acquisition of privately held iMODL, Inc. of San Jose, California. iMODL provides high-value verification intellectual property (IP) and system-level testbench automation software.

Under the terms of the agreement, TransEDA paid approximately $10 million in ordinary shares of TransEDA. All full-time iMODL employees will become employees of TransEDA following the acquisition. The acquisition enhances the company's strategy of offering complete design and verification solutions for electronic chip and system-on-chip designers.

The iMODL solution increases verification productivity for chip designers through pre-silicon validation, which automates the development and use of a realistic system-level test environment. The combination of robust verification IP and testbench automation enables design groups to find design errors at the system level before committing the chip designs to silicon.

``Verification IP is likely to become a much larger business than design IP in the next three to five years,'' said Yatin Trivedi, director of engineering of Intrinsix Corp. ``iMODL's overall approach and its combination of verification IP and test automation is unique, interesting and promising.''

``The acquisition of iMODL marks a major expansion of TransEDA's product line and a move to offer compelling new verification solutions at the system level,'' said Ellis Smith, chief executive officer of TransEDA. ``It also positions TransEDA as a leader in the growing verification IP market.''

The iMODL pre-silicon validation solution is based on the concept of modeling the system around the chip being verified, stressing the design with realistic traffic scenarios and automatically checking for errors. It enables the design team to verify the design by observing the interactions between the custom silicon and the other components that will be in the complete system. This speeds time-to-market by finding system-level bugs before tape out and eliminating silicon re-spins. The verification IP further reduces verification time by removing the need to create custom models for the major components in the system.

``The combination of the technologies and capabilities of the two companies make for some very exciting solutions to address the growing functional verification problem that our customers are facing,'' commented Alakesh Chetia, President and CEO of iMODL who will assume a senior management role within TransEDA.

The iMODL solution fits into customers' existing verification environments without requiring methodology changes or learning new, proprietary languages. A production-proven verification IP library currently includes bus functional models and protocol checkers for McKinley, Foster, Itanium, Pentium 4, Pentium III, Pentium II, and Pentium Pro microprocessors from Intel; processors from MIPS; and monitors and agents for PCI, PCI-X and other standard buses. These models, bus monitors and agents work in conjunction with the system-level testbench automation tool, iControl, to provide a realistic system-level environment in which to verify the design under test.

iMODL customers include Bull, Fujitsu, Hewlett Packard, Hitachi, IBM, NEC, ServerWorks, Siemens-Nixdorf, SGI, Unisys and other electronic system design companies.

About TransEDA

TransEDA PLC develops and markets design verification solutions that perform configurable HDL checking, coverage analysis, test suite analysis and FSM analysis for electronic integrated circuits (ICs) and systems on a chip (SoC). TransEDA's customers include 18 of the top 20 semiconductor vendors. For more information, contact TransEDA at 985 University Avenue, Los Gatos, California 95032, telephone 408/335-1300, fax 408/335-1319, email info@transeda.com, or visit http://www.transeda.com.

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Contact:
     TransEDA
     Tom Borgstrom, 408/335-1303
     tom.borgstrom@transeda.com
      or
     Cayenne Communication
     Michelle Clancy, 252/940-0981
     michelle.clancy@cayennecom.com
      or
     PentaCom
     Sharon Graves, +44 1242 525205
     sharon.graves@btinternet.com