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GATEROCKET FOUNDED BY INDUSTRY VETERANS TO ADDRESS THE DESIGN VERIFICATION BOTTLENECK FOR ADVANCED FPGAS 

Bedford, Massachusetts, October, 2004: GateRocket, Inc. today announced its founding by industry veterans, Chris Schalick and Stacy Swider.

“When I made the transition from ASIC to FPGA I realized that the FPGA design process is very different than that for ASICs and that the there were no adequate tools to verify and test these sophisticated devices, I started GateRocket to address this critical problem,” said Chris Schalick, GateRocket Founder.

For significant designs, it is common for a design team to get to the point where they have a working simulation model of the design and an associated test bench, however this is the point where ASIC and FPGA design approaches diverge. With an ASIC design, the user starts with a known-good design and then iterates until they obtain a known-good chip. With FPGAs that model is turned on its head since the designer starts with a known-good chip and then iterates until they get to a known good design with that chip. The early days of FPGA blow-and-go debugging where the designer would program the device and just check to see how it works on the silicon are over. With FPGA design size exceeding 1,000,000 logical gates, they are as sophisticated as ASICs therefore the blow-and-go approach is a divergent and ineffective debug methodology. Unfortunately, ASIC tools alone are insufficient for advanced FPGA verification.

“As a designer with hand-on experience in both worlds, I discovered several unique and powerful approaches to solving the FPGA verification problem and decided to productize my ideas,” Chris added.

About Chris Schalick: Chris is the technical founder and product visionary for GateRocket. He has 18 years of experience in modular systems design and behavioral system modeling for consumer and industrial equipment. Chris held several senior engineering positions for raster imaging, data networking and semiconductor test equipment companies and was instrumental in delivering products to market at Teradyne, Tenor Networks, Packet Engines and Cabletron Systems.

About Stacy Swider: Stacy, a founder of GateRocket, heads sales and business development. She has worked in the semiconductor equipment and materials marketplace. She created a reliability department at Applied Science and Technology and consulted on competitive analysis at MKS Instruments. Previous to that role, she worked in materials science research at the Stanford Research Institute and Crystallume, a CVD diamond start-up in California.