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MUNICH – MARCH 6, 2006
HARDI Electronics, the leader in advanced platform-based ASIC prototyping, today announced at the Design Automation and Test in Europe conference (DATE) the availability of two new series of third-generation motherboards that bring the high-performance of the HARDI ASIC Prototyping System (HAPS) for multi-million gate ASIC designs to smaller ASIC designs. Based on the Xilinx Virtex-4 FPGAs, both HAPS-31 and HAPS-32 help ASIC designers to verify their designs quickly and accurately by leveraging the best-in-class I/O connectivity and flexibility.

The new ground-breaking boards bring high performance and extreme flexibility to a wide range of design sizes - from 300k ASIC gates up to more than 30 million gates. No other system on the market has the capacity range of HAPS. With the addition of HAPS-31 and HAPS-32 to the HAPS family, customers can use the same high-performance building block technology beginning with a small design and grow the prototype size when needed. It is also very cost effective to be able to use several HAPS-31 or HAPS-32 in different, smaller projects and then put them all together when a larger design needs to be prototyped.

The new motherboards are part of the HapsTrak connection system which provides more than 900 I/Os per FPGA for user configuration. This is far more than any other system on the market. The I/Os can be used for FPGA-interconnect or for adding external devices such as memory, communication, video or data acquisition.

"The HAPS-31 and HAPS-32 expand our 3rd generation HAPS motherboards to give our customers more options," said Lars-Eric Lundgren, HARDI CEO. "Now it’s easy to quickly prototype the ASIC with exactly the right capacity and functionality. If more FPGAs are needed as the design evolves, they can easily be added by using HapsTrak to connect more boards. You can actually add one FPGA at the time if you like. Stacking a number of HAPS-31 boards on top of each other makes a very compact and high performance system. No other system has that level of flexibility. ASIC prototyping with HAPS has no limits."

The HAPS-32 motherboard series contains two of the largest Virtex-4 FPGAs (LX100, 160 or 200) and is ideal for prototyping 1.5 – 3 million ASIC gates. The HAPS-31 motherboard series contains one Virtex-4 FPGA (LX40, 60, 80, 100, 160 or SX55) and is optimum for 300k – 1.1 million ASIC gates. When using the SX55, HAPS-31 is aimed at DSP applications. The new motherboards, together with the HAPS-34 which contains four Virtex 4 FPGAs, provide HARDI customers with optimized prototyping hardware for designs ranging from 300k to 6 million ASIC gates per board. Like all HAPS products, they can be combined together like LEGO™ blocks for additional capacity and functionality. Virtually any design size can be achieved.

"I'm proud to announce that our engineering team has met all our design goals and created the most versatile high-speed platform available," stated Jonas Nilsson, HARDI Technical Manager. "One important detail is our new high-speed clock synchronization mechanism. It allows designers to stack the new HAPS-31 or HAPS-32 on top of HAPS-34 with zero impact on performance. It's just like having more FPGAs placed on the same circuit board. We have achieved data rates of over 800 Mbps between FPGAs on different boards, so our system is not the limiting factor for high speed ASIC prototypes."

HAPS addresses critical issues regarding prototyping board design such as cross talk, impedance and length matching, clock distribution, connectivity problems, gate capacity and system speed. The HAPS-3X has multiple, configurable voltage regions, and BIST (Built-in Self Test) that checks all functions. The HapsTrak Standard guarantees compatibility with previous and future generations of HAPS motherboards and daughter boards, including user-developed daughter boards.

For a complete description of the different boards, please visit:
http://www.synplicity.com/products/haps/haps-31.html
http://www.synplicity.com/products/haps/haps-32.html
http://www.synplicity.com/products/haps/haps-34.html

For photos of the new motherboards, please visit:
http://www.synplicity.com/products/haps/gallery.html

Pricing and Availability
HAPS-31 and HAPS-32 are available immediately with pricing starting at $8,900 USD.

For sales offices and worldwide resellers, please visit:
http://www.synplicity.com/corporate/globallocations/

About HAPS
HAPS (HARDI ASIC Prototyping System) is the first modular FPGA board system providing high speed, high capacity, real-time debugging and full ASIC functionality for ASIC prototyping designers. The system is composed of multi-FPGA motherboards and standard or user developed daughter boards. To accommodate very large designs, users can connect several mother­boards in many different ways. HAPS boards give designers virtually the same functionality as the ASIC, at speeds approaching that of the ASIC.

About Synplicity
Synplicity®, Inc. (Nasdaq: SYNP) is a leading supplier of innovative software and hardware solutions for the design and verification of semiconductors that serve a wide range of communications, military/aerospace, consumer, semiconductor, computer, and other electronic systems markets. Synplicity's tools provide outstanding performance, cost and time-to-market benefits by simplifying, improving and automating design planning, logic synthesis and physical synthesis for FPGA and DSP designs, as well as at-speed verification and prototyping for ASIC & ASSP designs. Synplicity is the number one supplier of FPGA synthesis solutions and has been rated #1 in customer satisfaction since 2004 in EE Times' Annual FPGA Customer Survey. Synplicity products support industry-standard design languages (VHDL and Verilog) and run on popular platforms. The company operates in over 20 facilities worldwide and is headquartered in Sunnyvale, California. For more information visit http://www.synplicity.com.

Synplicity is a registered trademark of Synplicity Inc. All other brands or products are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their owners

For more information, contact:
Bo Nilsson
Marketing
HARDI Electronics
+46-46-16 29 00

Barbara Marker North America PR; HighPointe Communications +1-503-209-2323

Bettina Lerchenmuller European PR PrismaPR +49-8106-24-72-33