Tanner Research, Inc. and MOSIS Form New Strategic Alliance

For Immediate Release 9-20-00
Editorial Contact: Stacy Parady
(626) 471-9700

PASADENA, Calif., September 20, 2000 - Tanner Research, Inc. and MOSIS recently formed a strategic alliance that allows Tanner to offer quick-turn and low cost IC design and fabrication services. Under the Tanner-MOSIS Partnership, Tanner Research, Inc. has committed to provide design tools, services, and IP products to customers, while MOSIS will provide prototyping and small volume production services. Customers will benefit from these two companies collaborating to provide foundry, EDA design solutions, and proven library products in a 'One-Stop Shop' venue.

César Piña, Director of MOSIS states, "This Tanner/MOSIS Alliance will be beneficial to all parties involved. We are convinced that offering a 'One-Stop Shop' operation will be very useful to many of our customers. They will now have the option of doing their own designs, or if they lack resources they can have Tanner Research do the design, and then they can obtain prototype or small volume production through MOSIS. This should be particularly useful for small companies which can reap substantial savings through integration of their designs."

According to Dr. John Tanner, Founder and President of Tanner Research, Inc., "We're proud and excited to be collaborating with MOSIS. With MOSIS's aggressive development of vendor relations with state-of-the-art foundries such as HP, TSMC, Peregrine, and AMI, we can help our mutual customers to realize their plans from product development to future manufacturing."

Tanner Research, Inc. is the largest PC based IC design tools provider. Both L-Edit Pro™ and T-Spice Pro™ are marketed as low-cost design tool suites with much shorter learning curves as compared to other EDA tools available today. Tanner Research, Inc. provides a complete MOSIS Design Kit that customizes the L-Edit and T-Spice tools for the MOSIS fabrication processes. This kit includes: Digital Cell & I/O Pad Library, Analog Cell Library, A/D-D/A Library, Layout Generation, and Technology Setups. Because of this joint alliance, Tanner Research, Inc. is able to offer a new level of commitment to support the low cost IC prototyping services offered by MOSIS.

About Tanner Research

Tanner Research, Inc., founded in 1988, is a leader in various facets of microelectronic design. The company has provided innovative electronic design automation software solutions to over 12,000 engineers in 35 countries. To streamline the design process, Tanner Research also provides training and consulting services for its customers. More information about the company, its products, and services can be found on the World Wide Web at www.tanner.com.

About MOSIS

MOSIS is a low cost prototyping and small-volume production service for VLSI circuit development. Since 1981 MOSIS has fabricated more than 40,000 integrated circuit designs for commercial firms, government agencies, and universities.

MOSIS provides designers with a single interface to the constantly changing technologies of the semiconductor industry. Mask generation, wafer fabrication, and device packaging are contracted to leading industry vendors. The cost of fabricating prototype quantities is kept low by aggregating multiple designs onto one mask set. This allows customers to share overhead costs associated with mask making, wafer fabrication, and assembly.

MOSIS gives access to a wide variety of semiconductor processes offered by many different foundries, including AMI, AMS, Agilent/HP, Peregrine, TSMC and OMMIC/PML. A variety of CAD tools and libraries, both foundry-specific and vendor-independent, can be used to prepare designs for MOSIS. For more information visit www.mosis.org.