COMPASS Announces Passport Foundry Program with World's Leading Foundries; Two-thirds of Worldwide 0.6 0.5 micron Logic Foundry Capacity Available through Passport Program.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 11, 1996--COMPASS Design Automation, Inc., a leader in electronic design automation (EDA) tools and libraries for deep submicron design, announced its Passport(TM) Foundry Program, a cooperative program aimed at verifying foundry process and characterizing physical libraries to ensure first-time silicon success. Charter members of the program include Chartered Semiconductor, ES2, LG Semicon, Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) and Tower Semiconductor. This program further underscores COMPASS' commitment to working closely with silicon vendors to provide the most complete and successful design solution for application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) and customer-owned tooling (COT) customers.

"As the number one supplier of physical libraries, COMPASS is able to bring its extensive experience in silicon process technology to help customers transition to finer geometries while maintaining first-time silicon success," said Ken Brock, business development manager, COMPASS Design Automation. "Working with leading silicon foundries such as these will ensure that a broader base of customers have access to `off-the-shelf' libraries so they can meet the most severe time-to-market and performance restrictions using a multi-source strategy."

"COMPASS has clearly captured the lead in securing the key dedicated foundries for its Passport Program and now has about two-thirds of the 0.6 and 0.5 micron wafer capacity supported," said Calvin Y. Chang, industry analyst at San Jose, Calif.-based market research firm, Dataquest. "With the 0.35 micron semiconductor equipment standardization efforts driving design rule convergence, Passport libraries are well positioned to capture an even greater share of the available market at 0.35 micron."

The Passport Foundry Program builds upon the relationships COMPASS currently has with leading foundries and moves the technology partnerships to a new level. COMPASS' program, the first of its kind, includes the following:

o Proof of multi-foundry manufacturing compatibility o Multi-foundry silicon performance within the Passport standard o Performance linked to silicon using the COMPASS testchip set

in joint development with Meta-Software's Meta-Labs o Passport Foundry Visa(TM) -- joint development of comprehensive

tapeout and tooling specifications per process per foundry o COMPASS and foundry working together to support mutual customers o Foundry design rule and SPICE model version tracking

The Passport Foundry Visa is the key element in accelerating the tapeout process when going to multiple foundries, according to Brock. It clearly specifies how to make foundry-specific mask tooling for IC design from a timing verified GDSII database. The Visa specifies the optical mask manipulations needed to achieve the same silicon performance targets at multiple foundries. By jointly developing Foundry Visas for each process, COMPASS and its partners provide an additional element to off-the-shelf libraries that meets customers' tight time and budget requirements.

"The ability to use an off-the-shelf library that has been characterized for different foundries provides an unprecedented level of flexibility for fabless semiconductor vendors such as Oak," said Dr. Mou Yang, vice president of operations at Oak Technology. "Using the Passport libraries qualified under the program will provide a tremendous competitive advantage due to the resulting time savings and silicon success."

The Passport Foundry program assures silicon performance across multiple foundries by running test silicon in each of the partner's process technologies with a target to achieve within 10 percent of the Passport standard. The COMPASS testchip contains a module that was jointly developed with Meta-Software's Meta-Labs to extract accurate process models from silicon. These models are used to test the process for Passport standards. Other testchip modules are used to prove the tapeout flow, perform SPICE to silicon correlation of Passport libraries, and for reliability tests.

COMPASS first introduced its Passport libraries in 1994. Passport libraries are based on a set of physical design rules that are compatible with many of the world's submicron CMOS process technologies and foundries. The Passport libraries offer designers an immediate, cost-effective solution for implementation of submicron integrated circuits.

COMPASS is a world leader in delivering standard cell and gate array physical and logic libraries to both foundries and customers who own their own libraries. COMPASS Design Automation is a leading provider of electronic design automation (EDA) tools and libraries for designing deep submicron application-specific integrated circuits (ASICs) and application-specific standard products (ASSPs). The company supplies a complete set of tools for silicon implementation as well as front-end design and provides foundry flexible Passport(TM) and custom ASIC libraries, memory and datapath compilers, and library development tools. COMPASS is headquartered in San Jose, California, and develops, markets and sells its products worldwide. More information about COMPASS can be obtained on the World Wide Web by accessing http://www.compass-da.com.

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Note to editors: Passport and Passport Foundry Visa are trademarks of COMPASS Design Automation, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.

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