THE SHEARWATER GROUP , INC. AND ADVANCED SEMICONDUCTOR TECHNOLOGY, LTD. ANNOUNCE DISTRIBUTION PARTNERSHIP SUPPORTING ISRAELI SEMICONDUCTOR COMPANIES

Ra’anana, Israel and Dallas, Texas, November 6, 2004 - The Shearwater Group, the leading independent worldwide provider of EDA tools, and Advanced Semiconductor Technology, Ltd. (AST) announced a distribution agreement for AST to support sales and marketing in Israel for The Shearwater Group’s portfolio of leading edge physical design tools.

“We are very excited to have AST distribute our partner’s tools in Israel”, said Shearwater’s CEO George Chandler, adding, “AST has an outstanding reputation and the breadth of skills to be successful”.

The Shearwater Group currently represents products from TOOL Corporation, Pinebush Technologies, Saratoga Data Systems, and Centerlink Corporation. AST accordingly will begin marketing LAVIS, HyperPlot, Bantam, and RetBuilder from these respective EDA companies.

“It is exciting for us to add the physical design products distributed by The Shearwater Group”, said Gideon Amir, President and CEO of AST. “By becoming Shearwater’s representative in the Israeli region, we immediately have access to best-in-class physical design tools from several EDA development companies. We have been impressed by the performance, capacity, and feature-rich abilities of each of the tools”.

Hideaki Hontao, President of TOOL Corporation, said “It is good to have direct Israeli representation for LAVIS. We have established a solid positioning the Japanese market, and are eager to see our products available for this new market”.

The President of Saratoga Data Systems, David Gariepy, added “Israel is a very important market for us to be in. Since we are focused on minimizing the problem of huge data volumes, it is logical for our tools to be an integral part of chip design teams transferring large amounts of design data”.

About The Shearwater Group , Inc.
The Shearwater Group is the leading worldwide distributor of Electronic Design Automation (EDA) software applications. Established in 1991, the company maintains offices and distribution in all of the major integrated circuit design regions worldwide. Our offices provide our customer base of over 500 chip companies with superior sales and support coverage conveniently in the local language.

About Advanced Semiconductor Technology, Ltd .
AST specializes in solutions for ASIC and/or FPGA, and works as a local distributor in Israel representing focused Electronic Design Automation (EDA) vendors. AST's role is as a provider of EDA solutions to hardware engineers and provides high quality, affordable solutions, with a high level of service and support.

About Tool Corporation
TOOL Corporation is a Japanese software development company focused on the EDA sector. With its proximity to the leaders in chip design and manufacturing equipment, TOOL is uniquely able to quickly comprehend and create chip design software solutions.

The LAVIS software is the highest performance and highest capacity product available to analyze chip layout data and fractured data. With LAVIS, the user can load multiple gigabyte files in seconds and begin the analysis of GDSII Steam Files, LEF/DEF data, and multiple formats of fractured data and job decks.

About Pinebush Technologies
PINEBUSH Technologies, Inc., located in Albany, NY, is a worldwide leading developer and supplier of high performance visualization printing and plotting software for semiconductor (EDA), IC, CAD, GIS, A/E/C, engineering, mapping, scientific, and other technical applications.

About Saratoga Data Systems
Saratoga Data Systems is an emerging EDA software company, dedicated to solving the problems caused by huge data volumes.  Saratoga minimizes inefficient and expensive local and long-distance movement of data with efficient, cost effective processing. 

About Center-link Corporation
Center-link is an emerging company offering RetBuilder, a newly available tool that enables you to create, view, edit, and transmit mask reticle orders. RetBuilder can help minimize extraordinarily expensive mask set orders.
Contacts: