** Apache Design Solutions that the company's Q1 sales "grew by more than 80 percent compared to the same quarter of the previous year while continuing to remain cash flow positive. RedHawk-SDL, the company's flagship product for complete SoC dynamic power integrity, also reached a milestone during Q1 with more than 100 production tapeouts from over 30 customers worldwide."

Andrew Yang, CEO of Apache, is very happy: "As the complexity of dynamic power integrity increases, our continuing technology advancements have enabled us to keep pace with customers' needs and to gain their confidence in solving critical design issues. Achieving a major milestone of 100 production tapeouts demonstrates the maturity of our solution and establishes RedHawk as the market leader in dynamic power sign-off."

** Altium Ltd. announced a donation of cash, software, hardware valued at $158,000 to the School of Mathematics and Physics at the University of Tasmania Foundation. The company says the donation is to be distributed over a 3- year period and is for the development and completion of two projects – a radio transient detector and high-bandwidth interferometer, both relating to advanced radio astronomy research being undertaken at the School of Mathematics and Physics. The donation was presented to the university by David Warren, Non-executive Director at Altium, and includes a substantial cash contribution, the company’s Unified Nexar-Protel 2004 software, NanoBoard hardware development platforms, matching interchangeable FPGA daughterboards, dedicated technical support and training.

Nick Martin, founder and CEO, Altium, is quoted: "Today's announcement demonstrates Altium's ongoing commitment to supporting and equipping the next-generation of electronic designers and engineers. Altium's electronic product development solutions are perfectly suited to meet the design challenges demanded by the School of Mathematics and Physics in their development of advanced applications for radio astronomy using FPGA technology." Well done!

[Editor's Query: Wish they'd told us what the University's mascot is. It's tempting to make a guess.]

** D.A. Davidson & Co. announced that Aalok Shah has joined its institutional research team
to cover the semiconductor industry.

Doug Woodcock, Director of Equity Capital Markets for D.A. Davidson, is quoted: "Aalok brings deep industry expertise and years of experience following the semiconductor companies to the job. He is a terrific addition to our technology research team."

** Mentor Graphics Corp. announced the company has joined the Consumer Electronics-ATA (CE-ATA) Working Group "to help further develop the new CE-ATA storage interface standard."

Per the Press Release: "The CE-ATA organization is focused on a lower cost implementation for storage devices targeting the consumer electronics market, with hard disk drive (HDD) demand estimated to reach over 380 million units by 2007. The creation of the CE-ATA technology is important because it will allow product designers and silicon providers to replace a 20-year-old technology designed for personal computer applications with a vastly different technology needed for handheld consumer products that require on-board storage capacity. Consumer electronics, such as the Apple iPod digital music players, multi-functional cellular handsets, GPS navigation systems, personal video players, and PDAs, require innovative storage drives that are small, rugged, and consume low power. The CE-ATA initiative fills the void in an industry that has lacked a disk drive interface specifically tailored to the needs of the handheld and consumer electronics market. Small form factor disk drive suppliers will aggressively strive to deliver end products that support the newly defined CE-ATA standard by the end of this year."

Also per the Press Release: "Mentor Graphics will immediately begin developing CE-ATA IP for SoC designs attuned to the requirements of the exploding 2.5-inch and sub-2.5-inch hard disk drive market … Based on its leadership in storage connectivity with offerings for both parallel and serial ATA technologies, Mentor Graphics will take an active role in the CE-ATA organization by defining the next level and range of features that complement and fully utilize the capabilities of the initial interface specification."

** Silicon Design Systems, Inc. announced the appointment of Douglas Fairbairn to its Board of Directors.

Per the Press Release: "Fairbairn's executive management expertise and industry experience span more than 30 years. A noted entrepreneur in the semiconductor industry and EDA, Fairbairn recently served as Chairman of the Board of Directors of Verisity, and founded Redwood Design Automation; both were acquired by Cadence Design Systems, where earlier he was General Manager of the Alta division. Fairbairn founded VLSI Technology, now part of Royal Philips Electronics; created VLSI Design Magazine; and served as President of the VSI Alliance SoC industry consortium. He also was President and CEO of Simutech Corp. He began his career as a systems engineer at the Xerox Palo Alto Research Center. Fairbairn holds BSEE and MSEE degrees from Stanford University."