Monterey Design Completes Aristo Merger, Names Management Team

Monterey Developing the Leading Hierarchical Design Solution to 100 Million Gates

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--April 11, 2001--Monterey Design Systems(TM) today announced the completion of its merger with Aristo Technology, Inc., thereby providing customers with a complete solution, from design planning to full chip tape-out of up to 100 million gate complexity designs, from a single company. All Aristo employees have moved to Monterey's Sunnyvale headquarters and, as of April 6, the integration of the two organizations is complete.

As a result of the merger, the combined company management team has been revamped. Jacques Benkoski will continue as President and Chief Executive Officer of the company while Simon Bloch, formerly President and Chief Executive Officer of Aristo, has been named Executive Vice President. Aidan Cullen remains Chief Financial Officer and Bill Alexander, Vice President of Marketing, will head the combined marketing operation. Both Alexander and Cullen will continue to report to Benkoski.

A new organization has been created to directly serve the customer base and accelerate the company's growing market share. Dave Reed, formerly Vice President of Marketing at Aristo, has been named Vice President of the new "Solutions Delivery" group, reporting to Benkoski.

The combined sales operation will be led by Norman "Bud" Suse who will remain Vice President of Worldwide Sales. In addition, prior to the merger, Maria Adolf was promoted to Vice President of European Operations, reporting to Suse. The company now has a combined direct sales force that includes 13 sales teams worldwide and 30 application engineers.

Jacob Greidinger, formerly Chief Technical Officer of Aristo has been named Vice President of Technology, a new position that focuses specifically on the combined product roadmap and new technology development. Steve Sample, formerly Vice President of Engineering at Aristo, has been named Vice President of Engineering. The group has over 70 engineers (45 with Ph.D.'s). To increase the company's focus on delivering quality products, Dennis Yamamoto has been named Senior Director of Operations, an organization that includes the quality assurance and release functions as well as technical publications. Yamamoto was formerly Director of R&D Program Management for Monterey. Greidinger, Sample and Yamamoto report to Benkoski.

"After just three weeks, the merger has started to bear fruit as several customers are already buying into the benefits of a combined solution," said Benkoski. "Merging the organizations has also allowed us to put together an extremely qualified and cohesive management team that will work closely together to tackle some of our customers toughest challenges. At a time when many of our competitors have hit hard times, we are emerging as the fastest growing company with the most complete hierarchical solution available for the most complex designs."

About the Products

Monterey's integrated, yet open solutions, Sonar(") and Dolphin("), already include patented Global Design Technology(") that has proven its value through adoption by leading semiconductor companies. The block based physical design planning and chip implementation technology from Aristo complements the physical implementation products by allowing very large, complex designs to be partitioned to achieve the smallest die size and highest performance. IC Wizard also generates the physical and timing constraints for each block implementation. Sonar's physical prototyping allows a rapid validation of the design planning assumptions to achieve design closure. Dolphin implements the full layout of the blocks and chip.

The entire system provides sign-off at the design planning stage, followed by the In One Pass(") implementation of a manufacturing ready GDSII tape. A semiconductor manufacturer or ASIC provider has access to an integrated solution from the planning and assembly of the blocks in IC Wizard to the full chip tape-out from Dolphin, for verification and manufacturing. This methodology allows IP reuse and large teams of designers, geographically separated, to work on different pieces of a complex system-on-chip design to enable the fastest and most predictable time to market.

About Monterey Design Systems

Monterey Design Systems is privately held and backed by leading venture and industrial investors to provide physical design solutions that increase the design productivity of the semiconductor industry. Monterey develops and markets leading hierarchical physical design software products that help its customers achieve production quality complex system-on-chip designs using deep sub-micron technologies, with faster Time-to-Silicon("). The company's products are based on several granted and pending patents and are made accessible through pioneering new business models that align financial rewards to its customers' success. In addition, Monterey's products are available as part of an innovative e-service model that enables worldwide collaborative design efforts. Monterey partners with leading EDA companies such as Cadence (NYSE:CDN - news) and Synopsys (Nasdaq:SNPS - news) to ensure interoperability in ASIC and COT design flows. Monterey Design Systems is located at 894 Ross Drive, Sunnyvale, CA 94089-1443, tel: 408-747-7370, fax: 408-747-7377, http://www.montereydesign.com.