Belfast, Northern Ireland [June 7, 2010]:  APTX, the award-winning audio processing technology company, today announces that Laird Technologies, a major global provider of electronics components and technology for wireless communications, has licensed apt-X® audio codec technology for use in a new family of high-volume Bluetooth stereo audio multi-chip modules intended for OEM integration into automotive, commercial, and consumer applications.

Laird Technologies selected apt-X technology to optimize the objective sound quality of stereo audio channeled over the 2.4GHz ISM band from all four members of its latest family of Bluetooth modules. Each of the Laird BTM modules – the “Class 2” (~10m range) 521 and antenna-less 520, and the more powerful “Class 1” (~100m range) 511 and antenna-less 510 – incorporates the CSR BlueCore5 semiconductor, the Bluetooth 2.1 system-on-a-chip used extensively in digital entertainment devices from media players, mobiles, and smartphones, to laptops, tablets, and games consoles.  Every BTM module comes pre-configured with apt-X audio codec software; OEMs are not required to program in extra firmware.

Asked to comment on the reasons for the licensing agreement with APTX, Carl Baker, the UK-based Director of Sales for Laird Technologies, said: “Laird Technologies wanted the best possible stereo audio quality for BTM, its new Bluetooth stereo wireless audio module designs based on the CSR BlueCore5. Once we listened objectively to speakers playing uncompressed music and MP3 audio material streaming over Bluetooth A2DP wireless we immediately knew we needed apt-X coding technology. With apt-X switched in there’s a marked improvement in the sonic purity of Bluetooth stereo audio.”

Stephen Wray, VP Licensing for APTX added: “This strategic license agreement with Laird opens previously untapped Hi-Fi markets to apt-X stereo Bluetooth. The availability of Laird’s best-in-class Bluetooth modules pre-installed with apt-X allows high-end audio designers to specify off-the-shelf, standards-based wireless audio technology for new product development; apt-X audio coding circumvents the channel bandwidth constraints inherent in the stereo Bluetooth profile and enables full-frequency bandwidth wireless audio streaming for the richest stereo sound possible.”

The BTM 510, 511, 520 and 521 Bluetooth stereo wireless audio modules are available now through Laird Technologies’ worldwide sales channels. Sales volumes of actual shipped modules are anticipated to reach approximately 1M units per annum in 12 months time given the increasing pace of new product design cycles in today’s global electronics industry, and the phenomenal worldwide demand for Bluetooth connectivity in everyday electronic appliances. Bluetooth capability already resides in over 2 billion electronic devices.

About Laird Technologies, Inc.

Laird Technologies designs and manufactures customized, performance-critical products for wireless and other advanced electronics applications.  The company is a global market leader in the design and supply of electromagnetic interference (EMI) shielding, thermal management products, mechanical actuation systems, signal integrity components, and wireless antennae solutions, as well as radio frequency (RF) modules and systems. Custom products are supplied to all sectors of the electronics industry including the handset, telecommunications, data transfer and information technology, automotive, aerospace, defense, consumer, medical, and industrial markets. Laird Technologies, a unit of Laird PLC, employs over 10,000 employees in more than 39 facilities located in 13 countries.

About APTX

APTX provides industry-leading audio compression solutions to the broadcast, professional audio, and consumer electronics industries.  The company’s apt-X audio codec technology has earned a reputation throughout the audio industry as the ultimate high-quality, low-delay audio data compression algorithm available.  Today, apt-X technology is licensed for use in broadcast audio codec hardware, professional audio systems, and consumer electronics devices, including portable media players and mobile phones, Bluetooth stereo headphones, and wireless microphones.  Headquartered in Belfast, N. Ireland, APTX has sales offices in the US, Japan, China, and S. Korea.

MUNICH, Germany and SUNNYVALE, Calif. – June 7, 2009 – OneSpin Solutions, an EDA company that provides innovative formal assertion-based verification solutions, today announced that it has enhanced its flagship product 360 MV to perform 4-state X-analysis and X-verification. This enhancement enables safe, exhaustive analysis of unknown, undefined, and “don’t care” signal values (X’s) and their propagation through a design. In contrast to simulation, it enables users to safely uncover all locations and conditions of unintended, dangerous X-propagation that lead to data corruption or errors in control paths. Moreover, 360 MV’s 4-state analysis does not suffer from the X-optimism that plagues 4-state RTL simulation, which results in incorrect coverage information, potential masking of design bugs and mismatches between RTL and netlist simulation – sources of functional errors that are often extremely challenging and time-consuming to find. OneSpin will show 360 MV’s 4-state formal analysis for the first time in public at a free verification tutorial in Booth #1311 at the Design Automation Conference (DAC) in Anaheim, Calif., June 13-18, 2010.

360 MV’s support of 4-state logic extends the 2-state logic (0,1) commonly used in formal analysis to include X and Z (floating values). 360 MV automatically identifies all design signals that can become X, and enables designers to use X-aware constructs – such as “$isunknown” and “===” – to write simple assertions to fully explore the propagation of X’s through their design. Failing assertions are debugged using 360 MV’s RootCauseAnalyzer environment. Its waveform viewer, SVA debugger, fan-in viewer, RTL value annotation, and driver tracing afford full visibility of X’s and full traceability of X propagation in the design, unlike 2-state formal analysis.

 “360 MV allows users to fully exploit the use of X’s for RTL verification and synthesis optimization without the pitfalls and risks of X-related bugs,” Michael Siegel, OneSpin’s VP Product Marketing, explained. “For example, designers can now easily determine whether given registers can safely be left uninitialized – to reduce chip area – without breaking their design. 360 MV ensures the X-robustness of designs before synthesis, saving effort in late gate-level simulation.”

Availability

The new enhancement is available now in OneSpin’s 360 MV.

OneSpin at DAC 2010

OneSpin will exhibit 360 MV in Booth # 1311 at DAC 2010 in Anaheim, Calif., June 13-18. Besides the complimentary 4-state formal analysis tutorial, three additional complimentary assertion-based verification tutorials will show engineers (1) the use of formal coverage analysis to automatically detect verification holes, (2) gap-free processor verification, and (3) progress in the exhaustive verification of complex arithmetic. OneSpin will show these tutorials each hour. Contact info@onespin-solutions.com for more information and to schedule private meetings at DAC.

About 360 MV

OneSpin’s 360 MV product family is the most comprehensive formal assertion-based verification (ABV) solution for RTL designs. In the past four years, 360 MV has been selected four times as one of the industry’s most innovative and significant products for functional RTL verification. It covers the broadest range of formal ABV applications for formal verification starters, experienced users and experts – from fully automatic RTL checks and powerful assertion-based verification all the way to OneSpin’s patented, highest quality gap-free verification. For more information, please visit http://www.onespin-solutions.com.

About OneSpin Solutions

Electronic Design Automation (EDA) company OneSpin Solutions delivers innovative formal verification solutions that ease and speed the functional verification of complex ASIC and FPGA designs. Market-leading telecommunications, automotive, consumer electronics, and embedded systems companies rely on OneSpin’s award-winning products to substantially reduce verification effort and achieve the industry’s highest-possible verification quality. For further information please visit http://www.onespin-solutions.com/ or emailinfo@onespin-solutions.com.

AUSTIN, Texas, June 7, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — National Instruments (NASDAQ:NATI) today announced the release of a new vision module for the PXI platform that provides a high-performance parallel processing architecture for hardware-defined timing, control and image pre-processing. The new NI 1483 Camera Link adapter module, in combination with an NI FlexRIO field-programmable gate array (FPGA) board, offers a solution for embedding vision and control algorithms directly on FPGAs. Engineers and scientists can use FPGAs to process and analyze an image in real time with little to no CPU intervention. Additionally, using FPGAs helps eliminate the need to design custom hardware.

“We see the speed and flexibility of FPGAs as a crucial technology to perform intensive image processing at high speeds,” said James Cotton, a graduate researcher in neuroscience at Baylor College of Medicine. “NI LabVIEW FPGA graphical programming tools along with NI FlexRIO FPGA hardware for PXI technology, allowed us to quickly develop a high quality eye tracking solution that can resolve fixation position to within tenths of a degree at up to 500 Hz.”

Engineers and scientists can use FPGAs to perform operations by pixel, line and region of interest. The FPGAs can implement many image processing algorithms that are inherently parallel, including fast Fourier transforms (FFTs), thresholding and filtering. The NI 1483 is ideal for optical coherence tomography (OCT) and high-speed control systems for applications such as laser alignment and sorting. The module is also suitable for acquisition from Camera Link devices with custom tap configurations and high-resolution sensors measuring more than 10 megapixels (MP) requiring hardware-based pre-processing.

The new module supports base-, medium- and full-configuration Camera Link devices as well as 80-bit 10-tap configurations, all up to 85MHz. This design gives engineers and scientists the ability to customize the image acquisition when using custom image sensors. The 85MHz measurement supports the Camera Link standardized specification to its fullest, creating an excellent fit for those working on applications with high frame rates. The module also integrates several I/O options including four TTL I/O lines, two opto-isolated inputs and one quadrature encoder input in addition to the many modular I/O and industrial communication options available for the PXI platform. Engineers and scientists can customize the NI FlexRIO hardware using the LabVIEW FPGA Module without knowledge of low-level hardware description languages or board-level design. By using the LabVIEW graphical programming environment, engineers and scientists vastly reduce their development time while making use of existing VHDL IP.

Readers can view the FPGA vision white paper on www.ni.com to learn more about the NI 1483 Camera Link Adaptor Module. Readers also can visit www.ni.com/vision to learn more about NI vision hardware and software products.

About National Instruments

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 15 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 5,000 employees and direct operations in more than 40 countries. For the past 11 years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company’s investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090, e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting www.ni.com/nati.