Bill Kao New VP of R&D for Arcadia Design Systems.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 27, 2000

Dr. William (Bill) Kao, a well-respected expert in electronic design automation (EDA), has been hired as Arcadia Design Systems' new Vice President of Research and Development.

Reporting directly to Dr. Wei-Kong Chia, president and CEO of Arcadia Design Systems, Dr. Kao will be responsible for the development, product operations and applications engineering of the company's popular Mustang(R) Datapath tool and other EDA products currently in development.

"We are very excited to be able to bring in someone with Dr. Kao's vast experience in EDA R&D," stated Dr. Chia, Arcadia Design Systems' President and CEO. "His leadership will be essential as we start to bring other new products to market."

Dr. Kao has over 25 years experience in the semiconductor and EDA industries, managing R&D, product engineering and engineering operations. His most recent position was R&D Group Director, Custom IC Design Group, Cadence Design Systems, where he managed the development and product marketing for physical IC design tools. In over 10 years at Cadence, Dr. Kao held a variety of positions including R&D Group Director for the Mixed-Signal IC Design Group and the Analog Division. From 1979 to 1989, he held engineering management and technical positions at Xerox Corporation in El Segundo. In 1982 and 1983, he was a visiting professor in the Electrical Engineering Department of UCLA, where he taught advanced courses in computer-aided design. From 1976 to 1979, he worked in the Design Automation Department at Texas Instruments in Dallas on microprocessor and memory design tools and methodologies.

Dr. Kao holds bachelor's, master's and PhD degrees from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign. He is a Senior Member of IEEE, has published over 40 technical articles, as was the Associate Editor for the IEEE Transactions of Circuits and Systems from 1997 to 1999 covering the areas of CAD and modeling. He is a member of Eta Kappa Nu and a member of the IEEE Circuits and Systems Analog Signal Processing Committee and Computer Society Test Technology Technical Council.

Arcadia Design Systems, the 35th fastest growing private company in Silicon Valley(1), is the leading supplier of datapath design EDA tools and a leading supplier of high-performance, low-power IC design services and solutions for chips that dramatically improve the performance of internet devices, communications devices, graphics processors, DSPs, microprocessors and other applications. Visit Arcadia Design Systems at www.ArcadiaDesign.com.

(1) According to the Business Journal Serving San Jose and Silicon Valley, October 1999.

Note to Editors: Mustang is a registered trademark of Arcadia Design Systems, Inc.