Oki Electric Cuts SoC Development Time by One Third; CoWare's ConvergenSC Enables Fast System Verification

Tokyo, Japan and San Jose Calif., November 29, 2004 * * * Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd (referred to below as "Oki Electric") and CoWare® Inc., the leading supplier of system-level electronic design automation (EDA) software and services, announced that Oki Electric has developed a System Level SoC verification methodology for µPlat®, Oki Electric's integrated platform for system-on-chip (SoC) development, by using the SystemC-based ConvergenSCT SoC design environment from CoWare. The adoption of this environment has reduced Oki Electric's SoC development time by 1/3 of its original time.

As the electronic product development cycle has shortened, producers are pressed to find ways to further reduce the SoC development period needed for each product. After determining that FPGA(1) -based prototyping board verification could not deliver practical system verification times for the most advanced SoCs - with their increasing speed and level of integration-Oki Electric developed a new design methodology capable of simulating entire systems.

"By deploying ConvergenSC, Oki Electric has succeeded in creating and simulating operations with a high precision virtual platform with execution cycle count error within six percent of physical prototyping boards, which were supplied to customers for SoC verification," said Mr. Masasuke Kishi, vice president, Silicon Solutions Company, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. "We, therefore, have developed a design methodology without the need for prototyping boards. This in turn eliminates the time and cost of producing these boards, making it possible to verify systems months earlier, and greatly reducing SoC development time."

"We are pleased that Oki Electric has achieved such great results by leveraging CoWare products for its µPLAT virtual platforms," said Alan Naumann, president and CEO of CoWare. "Oki Electric's µPLAT is recognized for its ability to minimize SoC development time. CoWare ConvergenSC brings a new level of innovation to µPLAT, helping Oki Electric and its customers further reduce design cycle times and costs while improving design efficiency in SoC development."

CoWare's ConvergenSC offers a vast range of analysis functions, an AMBA bus generator, the industry's largest IP model library for SystemC including ARM® models, and a high-performance software development environment with excellent cost efficiency, providing overall speed and exactness. The environment makes it easy to build a virtual platform for initial software development and hardware/software co-design.

About CoWare's ConvergenSC Product Family

CoWare ConvergenSC speeds concurrent design of SoCs with embedded software. With the ConvergenSC product family, developers can perform hardware/software partitioning and platform assembly as well as simulation, debugging and analysis. Together with the ConvergenSC Model Library, the largest IP model library for SystemC, customers are able to rapidly model and evaluate SoC designs at the transaction level in SystemC. For pricing information, contact your local sales office. For more information about ConvergenSC and other CoWare products, visit www.coware.com or www.coware.co.jp.

About Oki Electric's µPLAT

µPLAT is the integrated platform developed by Oki Electric system LSI development which contains an ARM CPU core and also includes software and service.

About CoWare

CoWare is the leading supplier of system-level electronic design automation (EDA) software tools and services. CoWare offers a comprehensive set of electronic system-level (ESL) tools that enable SoC developers to "differentiate by design" through the creation of system-IP including embedded processors, on-chip buses, and DSP algorithms; the architecture of optimized SoC platforms; and hardware/software co-design. The company's solutions are based on open industry standards including SystemC. CoWare's customers are major systems, semiconductor, and IP companies in the market where consumer electronics, computing, and communications converge. CoWare's corporate investors include ARM Ltd. [(LSE: ARM); (NASDAQ: ARMHY)], Cadence Design Systems (NYSE: CDN), 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.

About Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd.

Founded more than a century ago in 1881, Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. is Japan's first telecommunications manufacturer, with its headquarter in Tokyo, Japan. With the corporate vision, "Oki, Network Solutions for a Global Society," Oki Electric provides top-quality products, technologies and solutions to its customers through its telecommunications systems, information systems and electronic devices segments. All three segments are integrated into one effective organization that functions as a collective force to create exciting new products and technologies, including information and telecom converged solutions. Through its business activities, Oki Electric satisfies a spectrum of customer needs in various markets. Visit Oki's global web site at http://www.oki.com/.

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µPLAT is a registered trademark of Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. in Japan, Germany and the UK.

ConvergenSC and LISATek are trademarks of CoWare, Inc. CoWare is a registered trademark of CoWare, Inc. in the United States and Japan.

ARM and ARM7TDMI are registered trademarks of ARM Limited in the EU and USA. ARM7, ARM9 and ARM946E-S are trademarks of ARM Limited. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders. ARM is used to represent ARM Holdings plc (LSE: ARM and NASDAQ: ARMHY); its operating company ARM Limited; and the regional subsidiaries ARM INC.; ARM KK; ARM Korea Ltd.; ARM Taiwan; ARM France SAS; ARM Consulting (Shanghai) Co. Ltd.; and ARM Belgium N.V.