Philips Semiconductors Purchases Silicon Perspective's First Encounter for Timing Closure On Critical IC Design Projects

Business Wire, June 26, 2000

Business Editors, High-Tech Writers

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 26, 2000

Silicon Perspective Corporation(R) (SPC), a leading supplier of front-end physical design solutions, today announced a major sale to Philips Semiconductors of its First Encounter(TM) product. Philips Semiconductors, a leading provider of semiconductors and silicon systems platforms, is using First Encounter for the design of its complex, next-generation multimedia chips.

The purchase is a direct result of a successful benchmark completed by Philips Semiconductors. Their detailed analysis evaluated many criteria including performance, turn-around time, timing closure, and the maturity of the tool.

"The fact that First Encounter is a production-proven tool was critically important to Philips Semiconductors. We knew we could immediately add the tool as a key part of our design methodology for our next-generation, set-top box chip," said Lane Albanese, Director of IC Engineering for the Set Top Box Business Segment of Philips Semiconductors.

According to Ping Chao, president and CEO at SPC, "Philips Semiconductors needed a tool that could help them today to deliver high performance chips in a tight time-to-market window. We are very proud that First Encounter came out on top after their thorough evaluation. We look forward to expanding our working relationship with Philips."

About Philips Semiconductors

Philips Semiconductors is a product division of Philips Electronics N.V., headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, the world's sixth largest electronics company. Philips Semiconductors, which has annual revenues of approximately $5 billion, designs and manufactures semiconductors and silicon systems platforms, and is one of the top ten semiconductor suppliers in the world.

Philips Semiconductors has offices on every continent, in over 40 countries and has 27,000 employees worldwide. Philips Semiconductors manufactures over 50 million integrated circuits (IC's) and discrete devices every day for a huge diversity of markets and applications. The company is a leader in communications, consumer, PC peripherals and automotive semiconductors, which are key applications for convergence in end-user products. For more information: www.philips.semiconductors.com.

About SPC

Silicon Perspective Corporation is the pioneer and technology leader in Front-End Physical Design Environment(TM) tools and methodology for the deep sub-micron (DSM) system-on-chip (SoC) market. SPC's technology brings an unprecedented level of speed, accuracy, ease-of-use, and timing optimization to front-end physical design. Its integrated tool suite bridges the current gap between the logic and physical design teams, accelerating the completion of timing-correct silicon and providing more efficient implementation. The company's products are compatible with industry-standard tool interfaces and data formats, and work with popular software tool sets from Avant! (Nasdaq:AVNT), Cadence (NYSE:CDN), and Synopsys (Nasdaq:SNPS).

SPC is headquartered at 3211 Scott Boulevard, Santa Clara, California, 95054, U.S.A. Telephone: 408/327-0900, Fax: 408/727-4450. The SPC branch office for Japan and Asia is located at 3-17-6 Shin-Yokohama, Kouhoku-ku, Yokohama, Japan, and may be reached at 045-474-8970, Fax 045-474-8971.

Visit Silicon Perspective Corporation at www.SiPerspective.com for more information.

Silicon Perspective Corporation, First Encounter, and Front-End Physical Design Environment are trademarks of Silicon Perspective Corporation. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.