NEWS & EVENTS

Forte Design Systems Expands Management Team, Worldwide Sales Team

Creates dedicated organization to support rapidly increasing acceptance of Cynthesizer for production design

San Jose, Calif. – June 6, 2005 - Forte Design Systems today announced the appointments of two key executives to support its rapidly expanding business. In addition, the company announced the expansion of its global sales team in Europe and Asia.

The company has attracted senior management talent in industry veteran Tom Katsioulas, who will serve as Sr. vice president of strategy and business development. Additionally, Brett Cline, formerly Forte's vice president of marketing, has been promoted to the role of vice president of customer operations & services and corporate communications. These two executives will drive corporate strategy and customer services.

Expanded Management Team
Mr. Katsioulas brings over 20 years of experience in EDA and IC industries. Prior to joining Forte he was a management consultant for EDA startups following his tenure as the founder and CEO of AmmoCore Technology. Mr. Katsioulas has also held senior marketing positions at Cadence Design Systems and led product strategies that quadrupled their physical tool business. Prior to Cadence, Mr. Katsioulas held management and engineering positions at Tangent Systems and Digital Equipment Corporation.

"Tom Katsioulas has a successful track record of getting broad traction for new products in the EDA market," stated Jacob Jacobsson, Forte's CEO. "As we move our behavioral synthesis solutions from first production projects with select technical partners to a full, broad scale product deployment, Tom's extensive marketing and business development experience will be a strong complement to our world class team."

"Brett Cline's role has been expanded to include customer operations and support, in addition to corporate communications," continued Jacobsson. "Forte places a great deal of importance on active support and communication with our customers. Brett's job is to ensure the continuing success of our customers in using our products, thus supporting the accelerating use of our products in our customer base."

Expanded Sales Organization
Forte has also announced that it has expanded its global sales organization to support rapidly increasing demand for its Cynthesizer SystemC behavioral synthesis product and the accelerated use of Cynthesizer for production projects. To service its existing European customers and expand its presence there, Forte has opened its European headquarters in Grenoble, France led by François Constant and Vincent Thibault.

Mr. Constant joins Forte as head of European sales with more than 20 years industry sales experience having held management positions at Summit Design and Synopsys. He was also co-founder and CEO of Arexsys. Mr. Thibault joins Forte as European applications manager having held a wide variety of technical and management positions at Synopsys and Sagem Group.

Forte has also signed Seloco as its Korean distributor. The primary reasons for the expansion are Forte's growing worldwide customer base and product demand.

About Forte Cynthesizer
Forte's Cynthesizer significantly reduces the time needed to create complex chips and systems by automatically generating high-quality RTL designs from high-level algorithms. Cynthesizer is silicon-proven with uncompromising quality of results that often exceed hand-coded RTL. It is the only behavioral synthesis product that offers designers a complete environment including synthesis, verification, and co-simulation. Cynthesizer has been used on over 75 designs and is in production use in many of the largest systems and semiconductor companies worldwide.

About Forte Design Systems
Forte Design Systems is a leading provider of electronic design automation products that enable design at a higher level of abstraction. Forte's innovative behavioral synthesis technology allows design teams creating complex electronic systems from algorithmic designs using ASICs, FPGAs, and SoCs to significantly reduce their overall design and verification time. Forte is headquartered at 100 Century Center Court, San Jose, CA 95112. For more information, visit www.ForteDS.com.