Duet will buy CrossCheck in bid for design test sales

Electronic News, Dec 23, 1996 by Judy Erkanat

San Jose, Calif.--Duet Technologies, Inc. announced a definitive agreement to acquire the business and assets of CrossCheck Technology, Inc., and hiring CrossCheck's employees, adding a design-for-test services line to its existing electronic design automation (EDA) and design services business. As both companies are privately held, terms of the acquisition will not be announced.

"Duet is a service organization along the lines of Cadence's Spectrum Services," explained Duet chairman Prabhu Goel. "We acquired CrossCheck as a tremendous opportunity to serve the test portion of the design phase. CrossCheck's is a critical technology to service that space, especially for deep-submicron and IP (intellectual property) reuse. With CrossCheck, we have a critical technology in-house."

The acquisition agreement, under which Duet acquires all CrossCheck's assets, liabilities and customers, is subject to CrossCheck shareholder approval. The newly-formed company will retain the name of Duet Technologies, with Naresh Nigam remaining in place as president and CEO. CrossCheck's president, Ellis Smith, will remain on board as a consultant for one year. Both companies are based in San Jose, Calif., and Duet recently moved into CrossCheck's larger facilities. All 15 CrossCheck employees were transitioned to Duet.

"The deal looks pretty good from the outside," said Vic Kulkarni, former CrossCheck VP of marketing, who is now with Avant! Corp. "Duet has a lot of talent in India, with two design centers there. CrossCheck's business model wasn't working; it needed end-users to create the pull for its products. Duet is more service-oriented, geared toward systems-on-silicon and editing an end-user or IC vendor. It can provide the money CrossCheck needs.I feel it is important for CrossCheck to survive. It is a good technology. With Duet, CrossCheck gets Prabhu Goel's test knowledge, as well as access to resources and high-quality software."

CrossCheck's current VP of marketing agreed with his predecessor.

"CrossCheck was not really delivering a total solution," said Guido Arnout, who will step in as Duet's VP of marketing. "Designers don't like test and would like to outsource it to a company like Duet."

Mr. Arnout said CrossCheck started looking for a company to merge with 1-1/2 years ago, and approached Duet first in the current successful acquisition.

Duet was founded in 1991 by Dr. Goel, who also founded Gateway Design Automation, since sold to Cadence Design Systems, and FrontLine Design Automation, recently bought by Mentor Graphics. Gateway delivered the industry standard Verilog-XL simulator and, more recently, FrontLine delivered cycle-based simulation.

Duet, Dr. Goel's third major technology venture, is an independent supplier of design technology services, including hardware and software development, integration and validation customized to client-specific requirements. The company also offers pre-designed and reusable building blocks to leverage these services. Duet has a team of more than 300 engineers working on short- and long-term programs for a number of leading U.S. and international clients.

Dr. Goel expects Duet to go public within the next two years under his primary pursuit of a service business model.

"This acquisition is a part of our continuing program to build a full spectrum of design services solutions," said Mr. Nigam, president and CEO of Duet. "CrossCheck's patented embedded test methodology adds design for testability to the broad range of services we offer and will help our customers bring the highest quality products to market faster. We will continue to support existing CrossCheck customers and will enhance the capabilities afforded by CrossCheck for the benefit of its customers."

"The combination of Duet and CrossCheck gives us the library development resource necessary to launch this embedded test technology as a mainstream capability," said Dr. Goel. "We will now be able to offer turnkey solutions to cell-based IC foundries and systems houses not only in embedded arrays but also in structured custom design and systems-on-silicon. This acquisition provides us also with the resources required for test integration services ofsystems-on-silicon with CrossCheck's recently announced CoreTest technology."

Duet offers a complement to in-house technology development and deployment, leveraging an ability to adapt to rapidly changing market demands. It offers a full spectrum of services, from on-site placement to meet tactical demand, through turnkey development, to long-term outsourcing of complete development functions.

CrossCheck, founded in 1987, is a venture capital-funded test technology and services company for differentiated user logic and reusable IP cores in deep-submicron ICs and systems-on-silicon.

It went from licensing products to foundries to become OEM partners with Cadence last year (EN, March 13, 1995) when Cadence became the exclusive distributor of CrossCheck's serial scan software. Cadence took worldwide rights to sublicense CrossCheck's OptIScan line of automatic test pattern generation (ATPG) tools. CrossCheck and Cadence also collaborated on R&D in design-for-testability (DFT) for IC and ASIC design.