Nuvation acquired by IAR Systems as IAR continues push into North American embedded development tools market

San Jose, Calif., January 2, 2001 — Nuvation Labs Corporation, an engineering design consultancy, today announced that it has agreed to be acquired by IAR Systems Firmware, Inc. (OM Stockholm: IAR) a worldwide leader in firmware tools based in Uppsala, Sweden. With this agreement, all 33 Nuvation employees, including 25 hardware and firmware engineers, will be integrated within IAR’s Application Development Services division as part of IAR’s North American Operations group.

"IAR’s acquisition of Nuvation demonstrates our commitment to help customers shorten firmware development time and paves the way for further expansion into the US market. Our firmware tools suite is second to none, and now our ability to support them is unparalleled." according to Tomas Wolf, President of IAR Systems Firmware, Inc.

Terms of the deal were not disclosed.

Since its inception in 1983 IAR Systems has become the dominant programming tools provider on the European continent where it has attained in excess of 40% marketshare. IAR’s firmware tools, which consistently achieve top rankings in independent surveys, are gaining ground in the US market against Wind River’s (Nasdaq: WIND) tools suite. With this acquisition, IAR gains momentum in the US market and expands its consulting operations to support the further implementation of its embedded systems products.

"We are very pleased to join the IAR Systems Group. Nuvation’s customers will immediately benefit from the strategic combination of services and products that we offer together with IAR Systems." says Michael Worry, CEO and Co-Founder of Nuvation.

About IAR Systems Firmware, Inc.

By focusing on the embedded systems industry, IAR Systems has reached the position of leading supplier of firmware development tools for microprocessors. Since the company was founded in 1983, IAR has worked in close cooperation with the world’s major chip manufacturers to develop a wide range of programming tools supporting a large number of chip architectures. The tools today consists of highly efficient C and EC++ compilers in the IAR Embedded Workbench development environment, the device driver wizard IAR MakeApp for graphical configuration and initialization of the chip and creating complete device drivers, and the IAR visualSTATE® graphical programming tool with a patented technology to generate validated and efficient production-ready code. IAR’s mission is to dramatically reduce the development time for embedded systems. IAR Systems has offices in the US, Canada, England, Germany, Denmark, and Sweden. More information is available at www.iar.com.

About Nuvation

Nuvation is a leading Electronics Design Services (EDS) firm that provides ASIC, FPGA, board, and firmware design services for the embedded systems industry. Nuvation's design experience spans industries such as Communications, Consumer Electronics, Medical , and Security/Defense. Founded in 1997 and based in San Jose, California, Nuvation's customers include a number of notable companies such as Altera, Lucent, HP, JDS Uniphase, Infineon, LeapFrog, SanDisk, Finisar, and Trimble Navigation. Nuvation is a wholly-owned subsidiary of IAR Systems (OMX:IAR). More information is available at www.nuvation.com

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Contacts:

Chris Hallahan
VP Sales & Marketing
Nuvation
408-228-5580 x122
chris.hallahan@nuvation.com