Ample Communications Expands Family of Ethernet MACs Targeted at High Volume Enterprise Market; Eagle Significantly Reduces Overall Equipment, Footprint, Power, and Cost.

FREMONT, Calif. -- Ample Communications, a leading provider of communications silicon for wire line network systems, today announced Eagle-12 and Eagle-24, new semiconductors in its family of integrated, multiport Ethernet MACs. The 12 and 24 port devices integrate SerDes, MAC, classification and congestion management logic. This significantly reduces overall equipment, footprint, power and cost by leveraging system resources across more customers.

Eagle is specifically targeted for 10/100/1000 Mbps Ethernet aggregation applications in Ethernet switching, routing, Ethernet over SONET, security appliances and storage networks. Each IC has embedded serial line interfaces (SerDes and SGMII) and SPI-4.2 system side interface. Eagle interoperates with off-the-shelf Ethernet physical layer devices and optics via embedded standard SerDes interfaces, allowing customers to eliminate the need for external components -- significantly reducing pin count and cost.

Eagle has four priority queues per port, with multiprotocol classification based on VLAN, MPLS, MAC address and type of service. The device enables high priority traffic to be designated as strict traffic, guaranteeing that it is never dropped. Advanced logic such as dedicated broadcast and multicast features for video distribution, per port traffic shapers and policers, and virtual on-chip RAM are also included on Eagle.

"Eagle provides our customers with what they require most, a chip that performs a variety of functions, and still saves them significant cost in the end," said Marek Tlalka, vice president of marketing for Ample Communications. "Now that we have introduced Eagle, we have rounded out our product offerings -- giving customers a great deal of flexibility in their selection of line speeds and interfaces."

With the addition of Eagle, Ample now carries the broadest product portfolio on the market, including Harrier which has shipped over 250,000 ports, and recently announced Redhawk, the industry's first 2-port 10G MAC with multiprotocol congestion management and embedded XFI SerDes. Ample's product portfolio now spans the entire range of speeds from 10 Mbps to 10 Gbps and line interfaces from RGMII, SGMII to XAUI, and XFI.

Eagle-12, part number A2521, and Eagle-24, part number A2520, are packaged in 31x31mm FCBGA. Eagle-12 ICs are $155 and Eagle-24 ICs are $185 when purchased in volume quantities. Samples will be available in Q1 2006.

About Ample Communications:

Ample Communications is a leading supplier of high-speed Ethernet and SONET silicon for enterprise and metropolitan area network equipment OEMs. Founded in 2000 and with revenue shipments underway since 2001, the company has established itself as both a technology and a market share leader. Wide customer acceptance at Tier 1 and Tier 2 OEMs has resulted in more than 50 design wins for its 10 Megabit- to 40 Gigabit-per-second SONET and Ethernet silicon.

Ample Communications is located in Fremont, Calif., with additional development facilities in Sacramento, Calif., and in Bangalore, India. More information is available on the Web at www.amplecomm.com.