BTA and Ultima to merge

<%=company1%> (San Jose, CA) a provider of innovative design solutions to ensure deep-submicron performance and Ultima Interconnect Technology, Inc. (Sunnyvale, CA), a provider of IC interconnect analysis and synthesis tools, have announced a definitive agreement under which the two companies will combine into a new company, BTA-Ultima, Inc. The merger will be treated as a pooling for accounting purposes. The merger has been approved by the board of directors of each company and is subject to various closing conditions, including approval by the shareholders of each company.

"The two major driving forces in semiconductor developments today are nanometer technology and system on a chip (SOC) design. Yet, the gap between the potential performance achievable by nanometer technology and the realized performance delivered by today's SOC designs is widening," said Zhihong Liu, president and CEO of BTA. "To close this gap, nanometer SOC design solutions should be accurate enough to take into account device physics, and, at the same time, should be efficient enough to cope with giga scale design complexity. BTA, a leader in device characterization, modeling, and reliability analysis, provides the critical link between the fabless design houses and the foundries through its proprietary SiliconSignature technology. Ultima provides the interconnect analysis and synthesis solutions that are helping designers accelerate the shift to SOC designs. By integrating our expertise, we believe the combined company will enable designers to achieve next generation performance using current generation process technologies, thereby closing the gap between potential nanometer technology performance and the realized performance of SOC designs."

Wayne Dai, founder and chairman of Ultima said, "We are excited about the potential synergies in the combination of BTA Technology, Inc., and Ultima Interconnect Technology, Inc. The two companies have been successful in delivering innovative design solutions that meet the needs of our mutual customers worldwide. We believe the core competencies of BTA and Ultima will uniquely position the combined company to provide integrated device and interconnect solutions for nanometer SOCs. By touching silicon, we bring the ground truth of device physics to the early design stage. In addition, we are well set to expand design sign-off from logic to memory, and from large scale digital designs to high-performance analog, mixed-signal and RF designs."

Edited by David Maliniak
Managing Editor, ElectronicsWeb.com