TOOL CORPORATION AND THE SHEARWATER GROUP, INC. ANNOUNCE DISTRIBUTION PARTNERSHIP

TOKYO, JAPAN and Dallas, Texas, June 1, 2004 - The TOOL Corporation, a leading developer of EDA tools, and The Shearwater Group, a leading distributor of EDA tools, today announced a partnership for the worldwide distribution of TOOL’s leading chip design and mask analysis software tool, LAVIS.

"We are thrilled to include the TOOL Corporation’s LAVIS product in our portfolio. LAVIS is quickly establishing itself as the next generation software tool for analyzing and quickly viewing layout data and fractured mask data,” said Shearwater’s CEO George Chandler.

"We are exciting to partner with The Shearwater Group for worldwide distribution of our LAVIS product. The Shearwater Group has a strong team of sales and marketing professionals worldwide with significant expertise in physical design tools to provide outstanding support and service to its established customer base,” said Hideaki Hontao, President of TOOL Corporation.

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 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 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.