NEWS RELEASE – May 13, 2003 – SigmaQuest, Inc., a leader in product performance intelligence, today announced joining National Instruments Alliance Program to provide an integrated solution that uses National Instruments TestStand™ and SigmaQuest’s SigmaSure. This integrated solution bridges the gap between design, manufacturing, and test in complex, global environments and helps customers build and ship quality products more quickly and at a lower cost.

”Organizing test results for product performance analysis is an essential part of building test systems that deliver optimal product quality and performance,” said Richard McDonell, NI TestStand Product Manager. “With the seamless integration of SigmaSure and NI TestStand, test engineers now can leverage commercial off-the-shelf software to significantly reduce development time and avoid the high integration costs traditionally associated with test data management and analysis.”

National Instruments TestStand is a ready-to-run test management environment for organizing, controlling, and executing automated prototype, validation, and manufacturing test systems. SigmaQuest’s SigmaSure is a suite of highly flexible software tools for capturing, accessing, and analyzing test results in a global manufacturing environment. The integration of these tools provides real-time visibility into functional test and quality data across the extended supply chain.

"Partnering with NI not only gives us the opportunity to bring our Global Manufacturing Test solution to new customers, but the combination results in a total enterprise solution for the industries we serve," said Nader Fathi, SigmaQuest CEO. "We are pleased to work with NI; the integration of SigmaSure and TestStand is an outstanding combination that better serves our customers."

About National Instruments

National Instruments is a technology pioneer and leader in virtual instrumentation -- a revolutionary concept that has changed the way engineers and scientists approach measurement and automation. Leveraging the PC and its related technologies, virtual instrumentation increases productivity and lowers costs for customers worldwide through easy-to-integrate software, such as the NI LabVIEW graphical development environment, and modular hardware, such as PXI modules for data acquisition, instrument control and machine vision. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 3,000 employees and direct operations in 40 countries. In 2002, the company sold products to more than 25,000 different companies in more than 80 countries around the world. For the past four consecutive years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America.

About SigmaQuest

SigmaQuest (www.sigmaquest.com), a leader in product performance intelligence, is the first to enable automated testing and quality management for electronic systems manufacturing. The company's revolutionary "any-factory, any-tester, anywhere" technology supports automated test and quality data management and analysis across multiple geographies, test equipment suppliers, and extended supply chain members. Original equipment manufacturers and contract manufactures achieve lower materials costs, lower manufacturing and support costs, and faster time to revenue.

About SigmaSure

SigmaSure v2.0 consists of SigmaProbe, SigmaConnect, SigmaAnalysis and SigmaSPC. SigmaProbe provides real-time test data capture through its application programming interface (API) that supports C, C++, C#, Perl, Java, Visual Basic and NI TestStand.SigmaConnect employs peer-to-peer technology to mine the data warehouse across the extended supply chain. Based on SigmaConnect's flexible data mining capabilities, SigmaAnalysis provides configurable data visualization as well as packaged analytics. SigmaSPC (Statistical Process Control) is real-time analytics for understanding processes and improving quality.