Thief River Falls, Minnesota, USA – March 9, 2010 – Electronic components distributor Digi-Key Corporation, recognized by design engineers as having the industry’s broadest selection of electronic components available for immediate shipment, today announced it has signed a deal for the global distribution of gallium nitride (GaN)-based power management devices from EPC.

Established in 2007, EPC is a fab-less company with subcontract manufacturing in Taiwan. EPC’s key markets include voltage controllers, LED boost converters, power MOSFET and IGBT replacements, drivers, power amplifiers and RF MOSFETs.

EPC’s founders are committed to developing GaN products to be used as cost-effective silicon product replacements. In June 2009, EPC released the first commercial enhancement-mode GaN transistors. EPC has developed products with behavioral characteristics similar to silicon power MOSFETs to make GaN transistors easy to use.

EPC’s products for applications requiring 200V or less are available for purchase on Digi-Key’s global websites. Additionally, these parts will be featured in future print and online catalogs.

“Digi-Key has the fastest global logistics and the most efficient supply chain of any distributor with which I have worked over the last 30 years,” said Alex Lidow, EPC’s co-founder and CEO. “This will translate into fast and easy service to all our global customers who want to gain access to our enhancement-mode GaN transistors to replace their less-efficient power MOSFETs.”

“EPC’s gallium nitride-based power management products bring intriguing next-generation breakthrough benefits to existing MOSFET and Bipolar solutions,” said Dave Doherty, Digi-Key’s vice president of semiconductor product. “We are thrilled to be the first to offer these innovative products to the engineering community.”

About Digi-Key

As one of the world’s fastest growing distributors of electronic components, Digi-Key Corporation has earned its reputation as an industry leader through its total commitment to service and performance. Digi-Key is a full-service provider of both prototype/design and production quantities of electronic components, offering more than 1.5 million products from over 440 quality name-brand manufacturers. A testament to Digi-Key’s unparalleled commitment to service, North American design engineers have ranked Digi-Key #1 for Overall Performance for 18 consecutive years (EE Times Distribution Study/August 2009). Additional information and access to Digi-Key’s broad product offering is available at www.digikey.com.

About EPC

EPC designs, develops, markets, and sells Gallium Nitride based power management devices using mature silicon foundries. Enabling the most efficient energy conversion using superior semiconductor materials, EPC was the first to introduce enhancement-mode Gallium-Nitride-on Silicon transistors. Applications for these products include servers, notebooks, netbooks, cell phones, base stations, flat-panel displays and class-D amplifiers with device performance many times greater than the best silicon power MOSFETs. Founded in November 2007, EPC is a fab-less company with subcontracted manufacturing in Taiwan. For more information about EPC, please visit www.epc-co.com.

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., March 9, 2010 – Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS), a world leader in software and IP for semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing, today announced that it has enhanced its Galaxy Custom Designer(TM) solution with the addition of SmartDRD, an innovative design-rules-driven technology. SmartDRD technology enables layout engineers to more quickly achieve design-rule-check (DRC) clean designs with significantly reduced effort for analogue and custom designs. SmartDRD automates many DRC repair tasks, reducing hours of manual effort to mere seconds.

Driven by the need to manage increasing design complexity and ever-growing design rule counts and their interrelationships, SmartDRD was architected to reduce a substantial bottleneck in layout implementation. Until now, layout engineers have had to remember and accommodate all design rules without negatively impacting schedules. The powerful SmartDRD technology is designed to assist layout engineers during manual placement and routing by automatically bringing an edited design into rule compliance.

“DRC correction in custom layout is a difficult and time-consuming activity, and we often have to go through multiple iterations to fix all errors,” said Ebi Abedifard, vice president of engineering at Avalanche Technology. “Bringing automation to this task will help increase engineering productivity and eliminate a tedious step in getting the layout finalised.”

Custom Designer SmartDRD technology helps engineers achieve faster final physical verification and quicker time-to-tapeout. It includes:

• DRDAutoFix – Designed to automatically correct DRC violations. Developed around an interactive and incremental use model, DRDAutoFix allows the layout engineer to specify an area of a design for repair. DRDAutoFix automatically modifies that area of the design while keeping track of the design rules and their interrelationships to bring the design into rule compliance.
• DRDVisual – Designed to graphically show correct DRC spacing for wires and objects in real-time. Driven from the design rules in the OpenAccess technology file, DRDVisual provides dynamic highlighting that guides the engineer towards correct manual placement.

“Our new SmartDRD technology brings automation to an area of custom layout that until now has been primarily handled using painstakingly manual methods,” said Farhad Hayat, senior director of marketing for Synopsys’ Analog and Mixed-Signal Group. “By taking advantage of SmartDRD technology, layout engineers can identify and fix DRC violations in just seconds, significantly increasing their productivity without compromising quality of results.”

DRDAutoFix and DRDVisual are available now in the 2009.12 release of Custom Designer. To see SmartDRD in action, attend the “Custom Designer: Advances in Custom Layout Automation with SmartDRD” webinar premiering on March 23, 2010. The webinar will continue to be available online after the premiere for convenient viewing at any time.

About Synopsys

Synopsys, Inc. (Nasdaq: SNPS) is a world leader in electronic design automation (EDA), supplying the global electronics market with the software, intellectual property (IP) and services used in semiconductor design, verification and manufacturing. Synopsys’ comprehensive, integrated portfolio of implementation, verification, IP, manufacturing and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) solutions helps address the key challenges designers and manufacturers face today, such as power and yield management, software-to-silicon verification and time-to-results. These technology-leading solutions help give Synopsys customers a competitive edge in bringing the best products to market quickly while reducing costs and schedule risk. Synopsys is headquartered in Mountain View, California, and has more than 65 offices located throughout North America, Europe, Japan, Asia and India. Visit Synopsys online athttp://www.synopsys.com.