Press Release

TNI-Valiosys Joins Open Core Protocol International Partnership and Contributes OCP 2.0 Formal Library of Assertions

PORTLAND, ORE. — February 18, 2003 — Open Core Protocol International Partnership (OCP-IP) today announced that TNI-Valiosys, a leading system design and formal verification solutions provider, has joined the organization as Sponsor Member. TNI-Valiosys supports OCP’s efforts to create a common standard for IP core interfaces that facilitate "plug and play" SoC design. Adoption of an industry-standard interface enables TNI-Valiosys to put its unique formal solution in the hands of a great number of designers to help increase IP reuse and decrease time to market.

In addition, TNI-Valiosys also announced the first release of the forthcoming OCP 2.0 Formal Compliance Checks (OCP 2.0 FCC) Library of Assertions to be used in conjunction with the company’s static property checking tool, imPROVE-HDL. The combined solution enables OCP-IP members, IP providers and IP integrators alike, to rapidly and exhaustively verify the behavior of their SOC interface controller designs according to the OCP standard.

“Open, common IP interfaces will become increasingly important as the industry continues to move toward complex SOC designs,” said Giang Nguyen VP of marketing for TNI-Valiosys. “imPROVE-HDL combined with the upcoming OCP2.0 FCC library of assertions will continue to fuel the ease of OCP adoption, and underscores our belief that OCP is the industry standard for the future. Reinforcing this belief, we’ll be contributing two one-year subscription licenses of the OCP2.0 FCC library of assertions free of charge to all OCP-IP Governing Steering Committee (GSC) Members.”

“We are delighted to have TNI-Valiosys supporting OCP-IP,” said Ian Mackintosh, president OCP-IP. “The TNI-Valiosys announcement of important OCP products in the Formal Verification space is a testament to the widespread support and rapid adoption we are seeing throughout the industry.”

About TNI-Valiosys
TNI-Valiosys provides embedded software development and EDA tools to help engineers in semiconductors and systems companies more effectively model and validate their designs. For designs involving complex SOC bus, memory or peripherals controllers, designers can use a formal static property checker, imPROVE-HDL, combined with pre-defined library of assertions to exhaustively debug their RTL models in complement of simulation. For designs involving full-custom blocks, designers can use an abstraction tool, TLL, to abstract the transistor-level circuits into equivalent gate-level models for faster functional verification. VHDL/Verilog to SystemC2.0 translators are also available.

TNI-Valiosys employs 80 people at its headquarters and R&D facilities in France and has a distribution network in Europe, North America and Taiwan.

About OCP-IP
The OCP International Partnership Association, Inc. (OCP-IP) was formed in December 2001 to promote and support the open core protocol (OCP) as the complete socket standard that ensures rapid creation and integration of interoperable virtual components. In addition to Sonics, Inc., the inventor of the OCP technology, OCP-IP's founding members and initial Governing Steering Committee participants are: Nokia [NYSE: NOK], Texas Instruments [NYSE: TXN], MIPS Technologies [NasdaqNM: MIPS], and United Microelectronics Corporation [NYSE: UMC]. OCP-IP is a non-profit corporation focused on delivering the first fully supported, openly licensed core-centric protocol that comprehensively fulfills system-level integration requirements. The OCP facilitates IP core reusability and reduces design time and risk, along with manufacturing costs for SoC designs.

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