AccelChip Inc. announced it has appointed Vin Ratford as President and CEO. Ratford has served on AccelChip’s Board of Directors since 2002. Ratford is coming to AccelChip from Giga Scale Integration Corp where he was President; he will continue to serve as a director for Giga Scale. Prior to Giga Scale, Ratford was President of deepTECH Consulting Group, Vice President at Virage Logic, and COO of the Microtec Division of Mentor Graphics. He also held numerous positions in the System Test Division of Teradyne.

Accelerated Technology announced that it has joined the Eclipse Foundation, a software tool vendors consortium, which per the Press Release was "formed to foster the expansion of a unified development environment and wide product integration. Eclipse is an open platform for tool integration built by an open community of tool providers. The mission of Eclipse is to adapt and evolve the Eclipse technology to meet the needs of the Eclipse tool building community and its users. The use of Eclipse in the embedded industry is becoming more prevalent, and now the real needs of the embedded developers must be taken into consideration."

Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing announced an award from the Singapore Ministry of Manpower presented at the Annual Safety Performance Awards ceremony in July. The company says that all of its fabrication facilities were cited for "outstanding safety performance, demonstrating effectiveness in safety management systems and company-wide support toward implementing long-term environmental sustainability programs."

Tang Yong Ang, Vice President of Quality and Reliability Assurance and Fab Support Operations at Chartered, is quoted: "We share the achievements with our employees, customers, resident partners and suppliers in recognition for their responsibilities and ownership of our environmental, safety and health programs."

Xilinx, Inc. recently announced a $330,000 donation to the Fudan University School of Microelectronics. The company says, "A full complement of the Xilinx programmable logic solutions - including design software, silicon and reference boards - will be incorporated into course curriculum and workshops focused on advanced digital electronic design. The Xilinx University Program (XUP) donation will be used to equip a new Fudan-Xilinx lab with more than 50 workstations. The XUP contribution includes multiple seats of logic and embedded design software. Xilinx is also donating multi-media boards and demonstration boards equipped with Spartan II FPGA devices and CoolRunner II CPLDs."