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Jim Hogan named to Advisory Board, Jim Wagner to lead sales operations

Bedford, Mass. - March 9, 2010 - GateRocket® Inc. has significantly bolstered its technical, marketing, and sales acumen with the addition of two savvy and experienced chip design industry veterans. Jim Hogan, well-known EDA entrepreneur, investor, and executive has joined the GateRocket Advisory board; and Jim Wagner, with extensive EDA sales experience, has been named GateRocket Director of Sales.

Hogan has worked in semiconductor design and manufacturing for more than 35 years. He is currently Managing Partner of Vista Ventures LLC, and an active strategic consultant to public and private technology companies. Prior to Vista, he was General Partner at Telos Venture Partners, and Senior Vice President of Business Development at Artisan Components. In a long and colorful career he held senior engineering, marketing and executive management positions at Cadence, National Semiconductor and Phillips Semiconductor.

"GateRocket's approach to FPGA design is positioned exactly where the market is going in terms of the complexity and performance needs of the fast-moving FPGA market," Hogan said. "GateRocket is an ideal company for me to be involved with because they have a game-changing technology to serve a large and growing market."

Sensing the same opportunity brought Wagner to GateRocket. He has 25 years of EDA industry experience both at large and startup companies. His sales career has spanned semiconductor and PCB design and design verification, signal integrity, and physical verification, and he grew accustomed to managing top-tier accounts with GenRad, Cadence, Viewlogic/Innoveda, Mentor Graphics, Sigrity, and Valor Computerized Systems.
"We have a great opportunity to improve and streamline the design process for complex FPGA designers," Wagner said. "I am very excited to be here at the perfect time to really help this company grow."

About GateRocket

GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native® verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company's RocketVision® software debug tool and its RocketDrive hardware verification system enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time-to-market, and realize more reliable and predictable results. Learn more about GateRocket online at www.gaterocket.com and sign up for a free webinar.

All trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

The new enhancements improve the overall efficiency of RocketVision, a software-based debugging tool that is used in conjunction with popular simulation tools and GateRocket's RocketDrive hardware verification product. It provides simulators with visibility into the FPGA hardware and enables automated diagnosis by comparing intended behavior with actual results in the FPGA. With the new software release, designers now have the ability to move instances of one or more design blocks that were executing in the FPGA to run in the simulator. The user can then make changes to the RTL to fix bugs in their design and simulate them in software while the rest of the design executes in the native FPGA hardware in the RocketDrive.

"The significant increase in complexity and size of leading-edge FPGAs has put a strain on traditional verification and debug methods. GateRocket is focused exclusively on this FPGA debug crisis, providing a unique way to locate design errors, quickly correct them, and re-verify the entire design," said Dave Orecchio, GateRocket CEO. "These new enhancements streamline that process even more, allowing designers to fix problems on individual portions of their design without having to go through the entire design cycle each time. This approach has a dramatic impact on debugging efficiency for complex designs."

New features streamline debug process

The new SoftPatch feature allows engineers to try a "soft" RTL fix to the FPGA without rerunning synthesis and place-and-route, eliminating hours of unproductive waiting time. Typically, when a bug is discovered, each correction requires a new synthesis and place-and-route cycle, and it can take days to resolve each bug. This is especially problematic in complex FPGA designs which commonly have large amounts of unfamiliar IP and hundreds of thousands of design elements. The SoftPatch feature provides an intuitive and efficient way to sequence through each bug and test fixes for them without re-building the FPGA. In this way the user can verify multiple fixes in a single day and then perform an overnight build that encompasses all the changes - saving weeks or months over the course of a project.

The new version of RocketVision also includes an enhanced AutoCompare features that helps identify bugs at the block or full-chip level. It allows designers to automatically compare the signals between the RTL and hardware representations of the complete FPGA design and highlights any differences that occur. This significantly simplifies the debugging process and helps quickly identify the location of each divergence.

Pricing and Availability

Both the latest versions of RocketDrive and RocketVision now support 64-bit versions of the industry's most popular simulators from Mentor, Cadence and Synopsys. This enables the use of the RocketDrive with 64-bit simulation servers, which are increasingly necessary to handle the largest complexity FPGA designs.

RocketVision 5.0 is a RocketDrive option and is available immediately with a starting price of $9,500.

About GateRocket

GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native® verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company's RocketVision® software debug tool and its RocketDrive hardware verification system enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time-to-market, and realize more reliable and predictable results. Learn more about GateRocket online at www.gaterocket.com and sign up for a free webinar.

All trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

WHO: GateRocket, supplier of advanced FPGA design and debug solutions for Xilinx and Altera programmable devices.

WHAT: Exhibiting new, innovative technology to cut FPGA design and debug time by 50 percent or more. At the show, GateRocket will be taking the wraps of the latest innovations and improvements in Version 5.0 of its RocketVision debug and RocketDrive verification solutions.

WHEN: Feb. 22-25, 2010, DVCon, DoubleTree Hotel, San Jose, Calif.

WHERE: GateRocket will be demonstrating its products in DVCon Booth #802 - Attendees may sign up in advance for product demos at the show.

WHY: The significant increase in complexity and size of leading-edge FPGAs has put a strain on traditional verification and debug methods used in FPGA design. GateRocket is exclusively focused on this crisis, providing a unique way to locate design errors, quickly correct them, and verify the entire design with an extremely fast solution. These new enhancements streamline that process even more, allowing designers to focus on individual portions of their design and make

sure they function properly, without having to go through the entire design cycle each time. This will have a dramatic impact on the design times, and improve the efficiency of finding bugs in very complex designs.

About GateRocket: GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native® verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company's RocketVision software debug tool and its RocketDrive hardware verification system enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time-to-market, and realize more reliable and predictable results. Learn more about GateRocket online at www.gaterocket.com and sign up for a free webinar.
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All trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

The FPGA complexity race rolls on: The FPGA vendors have done amazing things with the new deep submicron 40 nm FPGA semiconductor devices. Altera's Stratix IV debuted with over 680K logical elements, the highest density, highest performance, and...  Read More >>

Bugs can originate at every stage in the FPGA design flow; debugging success depends on using the right tools and methods.  Read More >>

GATEROCKET DEVELOPS ROCKETDRIVE FOR ALTERA STRATIX IV FPGAs

Ultimate FPGA Verification/Debug Solutions Coming to DVCon Feb. 24-25

Bedford, Mass. - (February 17, 2009) - GateRocket^® Inc. today announced the development of its RocketDrive^® for Altera's Stratix® IV FPGAs.  The RocketDrive cuts verification and in-system debug time for advanced single or multi-FPGA based projects while adding significant value through seamless integration with a design team's existing verification environment, with no changes to the flow or verification methodology. 

The GateRocket team will demonstrate its products at DVCon later this month (Feb. 24-25, San Jose, CA), Booth 505.  Interested parties may also register for product demos at:  www.gaterocket.com/dvCon_2009.

"Our Stratix IV 40-nm FPGAs deliver the industry's highest density, highest performance, and lowest power," said David Greenfield, senior director of marketing, high-end FPGAs, at Altera.  "Customers integrating GateRocket's FPGA verification solutions into their design toolkit will be able to significantly reduce the verification and debug time of their Stratix IV FPGA designs."

            GateRocket offers two products:  RocketDrive, a disk-drive sized peripheral that acts as an FPGA-based "turbo-charger" to an HDL simulator, and RocketVision, a companion software debugging option that can cut weeks or months off of lab debug time.

RocketDrive^® is available in several configurations, each containing the largest FPGA in its respective device family.  RocketDrive also includes all the software required to set up and control the device and integrate it into an existing FPGA design verification environment.

RocketVision^® is an advanced debugging package that delivers additional value from the RocketDrive system by providing simulators with visibility into the FPGA hardware and automated diagnosis by comparing intended behavior with actual results in the FPGA.  With RocketVision, users can quickly identify the root cause of errors typically found only in the lab, and save weeks of in-system hardware debugging.

"We've been pleased with the reception of the market to the Stratix IV RocketDrive," Said Dave Orecchio, President and CEO of GateRocket.  "We currently have several pre-orders from key customers in the wired and wireless communications markets in the US," he added. 

The RocketDrive takes minutes to install in any Linux PC and integrates seamlessly with the user's existing design and verification environment.  The RocketDrive complements software design tools from the leading design automation tool vendors including Cadence Design Systems (CDNS), Mentor Graphics Corp. (MENT), Synopsys, Inc. (SNPS), Synplicity, Inc., and the FPGA vendor tools. 

A recent Chip Design feature article on FPGA verification and debug containing an analysis of GateRocket credited it with "dramatically speeding the debugging of the FPGA design and significantly reducing time-to-market."  The complete article is available online at:  http://www.gaterocket.com/chipdesign_article.

            Pricing and Availability:  RocketDrives for the Altera Stratix IV family will be available Q2, 2009.  For more information and to receive a complimentary customer case study, contact GateRocket online at:  www.gaterocket.com/contact.

About GateRocket:  GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native^® verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company's RocketDrive enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time to market, and realize more reliable and predictable results.  Learn more about GateRocket online at http://www.gaterocket.com/ and sign up for a free webinar.

GATEROCKET EXECS SPEAKING AT

FPGA SUMMIT IN SAN JOSE

CEO, CTO Deliver Early Christmas Present With Talks On Simplifying FPGA Verification & Debug

            Bedford, Mass. - Dec. 2, 2008 - At the first annual FPGA Summit coming to San Jose next week, GateRocket executives Dave Orecchio, CEO; and Chris Schalick, CTO will participate in tutorial and technical sessions on the thorny issue of FPGA verification and debug.  Orecchio is hosting tutorial session T3B at 2:40 PM on Wednesday afternoon with experts from Mentor Graphics, GateRocket, Altera, Agilent Technologies and Xilinx.  The FPGA Summit runs Dec. 9-11 at the Wyndham Hotel in San Jose, Calif.

"FPGA verification and debug is the number-one issue that affects time-to-market of FPGA based products," Orecchio said.  "I'm pleased to have this opportunity to share some of the new techniques and products to speed verification and debug now available from GateRocket," he added.  

"I am grateful to the organizers of this new and exciting conference for giving us the chance to discuss how designers can quickly eliminate the verification bottleneck and significantly reduce in-system debug time," said Schalick. 

            The FPGA Summit will focus on the latest hardware and design news in the FPGA world and includes three days of technical sessions and impressive keynote speakers.  GateRocket's Orecchio will participate in Wednesday's (Dec. 10) Verification Tutorial and hold court as the Summit's designated "Verification Expert" during Wednesday night's reception.  CTO Schalick will speak on the topic of Hardware Assisted Verification Wednesday afternoon.  For more information on the FPGA Summit and a detailed conference Program:  http://www.fpgasummit.com/.

About GateRocket:  GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company's RocketDrive enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time to market, and more reliable results.  Learn more about GateRocket online at http://www.gaterocket.com/ and sign up for a free webinar.

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All trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.

 GATEROCKET SHIPS ADVANCED FPGA VERIFICATION SOLUTION FOR VIRTEX-5 FPGAs

VerificationTime Blasts Off 10-30X Faster With Innovative RocketDrive

            Bedford, Mass. - October 1, 2008 - GateRocket^® Inc. today announced availability of its RocketDrive^® for Virtex®-5 FPGAs from Xilinx.  The RocketDrive cuts verification and in-system debug time for advanced single or multi-FPGA based projects while adding significant value through seamless integration to a design team's existing design verification environment, without a change in design flow or verification methodology. 

            "Xilinx Virtex-5 devices are the industry's predominant high-performance FPGAs and in many instances are being used to replace ASICs in applications such as wireless networking, imaging, defense and more," said GateRocket President and CEO Dave Orecchio.  "The RocketDrive's ability to speed verification, debug and time-to-market of products using FPGA devices will further increase the penetration of Virtex-5 FPGAs because it eliminates the verification bottleneck and significantly reduces in-system debug time."  

            "GateRocket's support for our Virtex-5 FPGAs, including the newly available Virtex-5 SX240T and Virtex-5 FX200T devices, enables companies to bring sophisticated products to market faster while benefiting from the technical innovation that the Virtex-5 product family delivers to system architects," said Tom Feist, senior marketing director of the Xilinx ISE® Design Suite.  "The more advanced designs get, the more important new verification technologies become.  We are happy to have GateRocket as a partner focused in this space."  

           Product: The RocketDrive is a faster and more accurate verification and debugging solution for FPGAs than traditional software-only approaches.  It offers the ability to exhaustively verify and debug an FPGA design before committing to production.  This is accomplished by exposing bugs that would normally only be found in the lab much earlier in the design phase, enabling shorter product development times, higher product quality and improved product performance. 

The RocketDrive helps speed time-to-market through:

• Rapid, deterministic, debug with functional fault root-cause identification in HDL source
• Simulation acceleration for both design and regressions development phases
• 3^rd party IP block validation by comparison of simulation models and FPGA hardware
• FPGA team design gains module HDL level, hardware validation, before integration
• Capture hidden simulation model, synthesis and place & route tool chain faults easily

            The solution is very powerful since it allows the designer complete flexibility to place any portions of the FPGA design into the RocketDrive and seamlessly integrate it with their verification platform.  This allows the FPGA to be used natively to (1) speed verification by replacing FPGA software models with actual hardware; (2) investigate hardware bugs and test alternatives; and (3) run application level software against a Device Native^® representation of the design.

            The RocketDrive takes minutes to install in any Linux PC and integrates seamlessly with the user's existing design and verification environment.  The RocketDrive complements software design tools from the leading design automation tool vendors including Cadence Design Systems (CDNS), Mentor Graphics Corp. (MENT), Synopsys, Inc. (SNPS), Synplicity, Inc., and the FPGA vendor tools. 

            Availability:  Virtex-5 RocketDrives are immediately available for all three device types.  RocketDrives employ the largest device in each family so that the drive can be used on a multitude of projects. 

• RD311 for designs with the LX330T device
• RD312 for designs with the SX240T device
• RD314 for designs with the FX200T device

About GateRocket:  GateRocket, Inc., located in Bedford, Mass., offers electronic engineers the first Device Native verification and debug solution for advanced FPGA semiconductor devices. The company's RocketDrive enables users to verify and debug advanced FPGA designs faster and with higher quality for greatly improved time to market, and more reliable results.  Learn more about GateRocket online and sign up for a free webinar.

About Xilinx Virtex-5 FPGAs: Named 'Product and Innovation of the Year' by EDN Magazine, the Virtex-5 family represents the fifth generation in the award-winning Virtex series. Built upon the industry's most advanced 65nm triple-oxide technology, breakthrough new ExpressFabric(TM) technology and proven ASMBL(TM) architecture, the Virtex-5 family includes four domain-optimized platforms for high-speed logic, digital signal processing (DSP), embedded processing and serial connectivity applications. Production devices are shipping now and may be purchased online or through Xilinx distributors. Visit http://www.xilinx.com/virtex5 for more information.         

 GATEROCKET RECEIVES $3M IN VENTURE FINANCING

-- Building out team to deliver advanced FPGA verification and debug solutions --

GateRocket^® Inc. today announced that it has completed a $3 million Series-A round of financing of led by New Atlantic Ventures, Massachusetts Technology Development Corporation (MTDC), and Long River Ventures.  Seed-stage investors and Angel groups also participated to bring the total GateRocket has now raised to $4.5 million.  This round of financing will enable the company to engage more customers and broadly deploy its compelling solution for Field Programmable Gate Array (FPGA) verification and debug. 

Electronics companies are shifting their use of semiconductors from very expensive custom chips called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) to FPGAs.  Today, 96 out of every 100 chip design projects use FPGAs.  New FPGAs have become far more capable than earlier versions with capacity and performance doubling each year, making them the favorite for many market segments.  The skyrocketing complexity of these next-generation FPGAs has created a crisis since design engineers experience extreme difficulty getting their chips to work with existing software design tools.  GateRocket solves this problem with a new product that cuts time-to-market by streamlining design verification and slashing system debug time by 10-30X versus existing methods.

"We are very excited about GateRocket's opportunity given the rapid move to FPGAs and the challenges that electronic engineers face when bringing products to market," said Todd Hixon, Managing Director of New Atlantic Ventures.  "FPGA semiconductor use is at an inflection point and GateRocket's product enables aggressive use of these devices by OEMs and therefore is a catalyst for accelerated FPGA market growth."

With this financing, GateRocket will increase its team in its Bedford Mass. office by adding both sales and development resources.  "We are looking forward to expanding our team to satisfy the demand for our products," said Dave Orecchio, GateRocket President and CEO.

Product: GateRocket's RocketDrive^®; it is a faster and more accurate verification and debugging solution for FPGAs than traditional software-only approaches.  The RocketDrive offers the ability to exhaustively validate and test an FPGA design before committing to production by exposing bugs you would only find in the lab early in the design phase, enabling shorter product development times, higher product quality and improved performance.      

The solution is very powerful since it allows the designer to place any portions of the FPGA design into the RocketDrive and seamlessly integrate it with their verification platform.  This allows the FPGA to be used natively to (1) speed verification by replacing FPGA software models with actual hardware; (2) investigate hardware bugs and test alternatives; and (3) run application level software against a Device Native^® representation of the design.

The RocketDrive takes minutes to install in any Linux PC and integrates seamlessly with the user's existing design and verification environment.  The RocketDrive complements software design tools from the leading design automation tool vendors including Cadence Design Systems (CDNS), Mentor Graphics Corp. (MENT), Synopsys, Inc. (SNPS), Synplicity, Inc., and the FPGA vendor tools from Altera Corp. (ALTR) and Xilinx, Inc. (XLNX). 

GATEROCKET WINS 2007 TOP PRODUCTS HONORS IN EDN, ELECTRONIC DESIGN MAGAZINES

Bedford, Mass. – Jan. 8, 2008: GateRocket’s RocketDrive™ made the 2007 top products lists in both EDN and Electronic Design magazines. EDN announced its Top 100 products in the Dec. 14 issue, and Electronic Design highlighted RocketDrive in its “Best Electronic Design” year end special on Dec. 3. The innovative RocketDrive was launched in April 2007.

“It’s a thrill to be recognized along with some of the industry’s great innovators by the leading electronics journals,” said Dave Orecchio, GateRocket president and CEO. “Many thanks to the editors for this great honor.”

In 2008 there will be nearly 95,000 new FPGA design projects according to Gartner/Dataquest, 32 times that of ASICs. While verification and debug of an FPGA is as challenging as any modern ASIC design, until RocketDrive there was no practical and economical solution to this daunting verification and debug problem.

The RocketDrive Device Native™ verification and debug solution is powered by the speed of hardware with the accuracy of the true chip behavior. An industry first, RocketDrive offers the ability to exhaustively validate and test an FPGA design before committing to production, enabling shorter product development times, higher product quality and improved ability to meet or exceed the requirements of today’s demanding marketplace.
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GateRocket’s solution allows the verification engineer to place any portions or all of the FPGA design into the RocketDrive and automatically integrate it into their existing simulation environment. This allows the FPGA to be used natively to (1) speed verification by replacing FPGA models with actual hardware; (2) investigate hardware bugs and test alternatives; and (3) run application level software against a Device Native representation of the design.