DAFCA Appoints Stockton Board Chairman, Names Coplien Object Architect

- EDA industry veteran John Stockton accepts chairman post; Jim Coplien is a world renowned leader of the Agile Software Movement -

FRAMINGHAM, Mass. – January 24, 2005 – DAFCA Inc., a provider of electronic design automation (EDA) software tools and intellectual property (IP) that enable rapid silicon debug and accelerate time-to-volume of sophisticated SoCs, today announced that John Stockton has been named Chairman of DAFCA’s Board of Directors, and that Jim Coplien has joined the company as Object Architect. These leadership appointments will further strengthen the company’s market position, and ensure that its software foundation will be scalable, extensible, and portable across a wide variety of applications and platforms.

John Stockton is a Leader in Semiconductor Technology and Commerce

John Stockton, a VLSI Fellow who was instrumental in the creation of ARM Holdings plc, was a founding member of the board at DAFCA. A veteran of Motorola Semiconductors, Stockton has been a prolific inventor and effective leader in all aspects of semiconductor design, processing, test, and technology transfer.

“John’s endorsement and commitment were a key element in our decision to lead the investment in DAFCA,” said Mike O’Neill, general partner with lead investor Kodiak Venture Partners. “He has done a terrific job in helping the management team navigate through their commercialization strategy, and has energized the growth of the company. The investors are very pleased to name him as the first chairman of the company, in recognition of his excellent work.”

Jim Coplien “Wrote the Book” on C++ Design

Coplien is best known for the 1991 book that shaped a generation of C++ programmers, Advanced C++. He was one of the founders of the Software Pattern discipline in 1993, and he has been helping that community deepen and extend its understanding of software architecture ever since. His early work on organizational analyses and organizational patterns are widely heralded as foundations of the contemporary Agile Software Development movement, a reputation that was cemented by his most recent work, Organizational Patterns of Agile Software Development, which has become the definitive reference for Agile development. Coplien also brings hardware debugging expertise to DAFCA. He is the creator of ISHMAEL, a circuit debugging environment that launched the evolution of hardware simulation and of hardware/software co-development at AT&T Bell Laboratories. Coplien's authoritative knowledge of object orientation greatly enriches DAFCA's software design capability.

“The most serious impediment to growth in EDA – beyond algorithms, beyond technology nodes, beyond complexity – is that the software is as friendly as a plate of stale pasta,” explained DAFCA CEO Peter Levin. “We have an embarrassment of rich technology in practically every aspect of modeling and design, but the community is sucking innovation through a straw because we don’t have a sensible way of integrating it into our existing design methodologies and flows. What’s worse is that the customers are losing productivity gains from applications that are brittle and notoriously unstable. Having a person like Jim Coplien ‘lay on the hands’ of sensible design and implementation is not just an enormous endorsement for DAFCA, it is a huge benefit to the industry.”

About DAFCA

DAFCA is an electronic design automation (EDA) software company developing a product suite for the creation of flexible Systems-on-Chip (SoC) solutions, which results in faster time-to-market and lowers chip development costs. The first supported applications for the DAFCA technology are silicon debug, error corrections, and ECOs. This unique technology enables chip designers to rapidly achieve working silicon and significantly reduces the time-to-market of their devices. Learn more about the company by visiting their web site at http://www.dafca.com.