SynTest DFT Tools Facilitate Micrel's First-to-Market Status

for Industry's Most Integrated ARM9-based
High-Performance SOHO Gateway Solution, KS8695

SUNNYVALE, California, September 3, 2003, Micrel Semiconductor (Nasdaq: MCRL), an industry leader in the design and manufacture of integrated circuits for the high- speed communications, power management and analog markets, recently announced the industry's most integrated high-performance SOHO gateway solution, the KS8695 chip and reference design package. With the introduction of the KS8695, Micrel is the first company to successfully integrate 5-port fast Ethernet transceivers, MACs, switch controller and on-chip frame buffer memory with a high-performance ARM922T core, offering a fully optimized solution for the SOHO gateway market.

This ultra-high performance SOHO gateway device was completed in record time, and the DFT (design-for-test) tools supplied by SynTest Technologies, Inc. a Sunnyvale, Calif.-based DFT software tool and services company, enabled an accelerated release to the market.

Dr. J.C. Lin, Vice President of Ethernet Products at Micrel said, "We were looking for a partner with a complete set of proven and easy-to-use DFT tools, who could support our efforts to detect errors up-front and avoid costly and time-consuming mistakes down the road. The chip was going to be complex and we knew that functional tests would not be adequate and reliable. We had to have high fault coverage and compact ATPG patterns. SynTest helped our design team achieve our goals." He further noted, "The SynTest DFT tools enabled us to test various modules on command, and maximize our productivity. The compact ATPG patterns generated by SynTest's TurboScan-ATPG software allowed us to reduce time-to-market-using ATE to test the structural reliability of our chip design and also provided greater flexibility in the choice of our ATE, to keep costs down. SynTest also provided exemplary customer support and we are very happy with our choice of SynTest, as our DFT partner."

Dr. L.T. Wang, President, SynTest said, "We would like to congratulate Micrel, Dr. Lin and his team, on their commendable achievement. We are very honored and happy that Dr. Lin put his confidence in SynTest and that we were able to contribute to their success."

How Micrel Used SynTest's DFT Tools and Services
To ensure a predictable outcome, eliminate potential design flaws at the last minute, and achieve high fault coverage, Micrel chose to use DFT methodology for a scan-based design from the very beginning. It selected SynTest's TurboScan™ scan insertion and ATPG tool to facilitate the testing of the KS8695.

About Micrel
Micrel Semiconductor is a leading manufacturer of advanced, high performance communications, clock management, Ethernet router, switch and physical layer transceiver, mixed signal, analog and power ICs. These products include devices for fiber-optic telecommunications and networking, cellular telephones, servers, portable computer systems, computer peripherals, process control systems, consumer electronics and power supplies.
For More Information: Micrel web site: http://www.micrel.com

About SynTest:
SynTest Technologies, Inc., est. 1990, develops and markets advanced Design-for-Test (DFT) and Design-for-Debug/Diagnosis (DFD) tools throughout the world, to semiconductor companies, system houses and design service providers. The Company's products improve an electronic design's testability and fault coverage and result in reduced defect levels and reduced slippage in Time-to-Market (TTM). They also reduce overall design and test costs, by helping to reduce design iterations as well as the time and reloads on Automatic Test Equipment (ATE). These products include tools for logic BIST, memory BIST, boundary-scan synthesis, DFT testability analysis, VirtualScan synthesis and ATPG with XtremeCompact. test vectors, concurrent fault simulation, silicon debug and diagnosis. The company headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, has offices in Taiwan, Korea and Japan, and distributors in Europe and Asia including Israel. More information is available at www.syntest.com.

TurboBSD, TurboScan, VirtualScan, and XtremeCompact are trademarks of SynTest Technologies, Inc. ARM9 is a registered mark of ARM Ltd. All other trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Acronyms:
ASIC: Application Specific Integrated Circuits
ATE: Automatic Test Equipment
ATPG: Automatic Test Program Generation
BIST: Built-In Self-Test
DFT: Design-for-Test
DFD: Design-for-Debug/Diagnosis
IDM: Integrated Device Manufacturer
RTL: Register Transfer Level
SoC: System-on-Chip

For more information:
Nayan Pradhan, Senior Marketing Manager, SynTest Technologies, Inc.
408-720-9956 ext. 301, nayan@syntest.com