BSQUARE Announces New Suite for Windows CE 3.0 to Speed Development of Intelligent Computing Devices.

Business/High Tech Editors

Embedded Systems Conference 2000

Booth No. 1345

BELLEVUE, Wash.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 14, 2000

WinDK Xpress Kit Suite 3.0 for Windows CE Delivers Essential Platform and Driver Development Tools for Rapid Device Development On

Windows CE 3.0

BSQUARE today released WinDK(TM) Xpress Kit Suite(TM) 3.0 for Windows CE, a full-featured platform development toolkit that helps developers quickly launch their Windows CE 3.0 projects, develop high performance device drivers and reduce time-to-market for their Windows CE powered intelligent devices.

The new suite combines BSQUARE's CE Xpress(TM) Kits and WinDK for Windows CE, a device driver development toolkit, into a single product that works together with Platform Builder 3.0, the comprehensive set of development tools developed by Microsoft for Windows CE 3.0 that enables developers to quickly bring their products to market. BSQUARE will demonstrate the new suite in booth No. 1345 and in the Microsoft Partner Pavilion at the Embedded Systems Conference, September 26 through 28.

"With Windows CE 3.0 now available, we're seeing escalating demand for 3.0-compatible development tools," said Paul Lever, director of the Platform Technologies group at BSQUARE. "Our new suite works in unison with the Platform Builder 3.0 integrated development environment to provide additional functionality. The suite will enable developers to immediately bring up Windows CE on a platform and begin developing their intelligent computing devices."

"With the rapid growth of the embedded marketplace, Microsoft is proud to have delivered the Windows CE 3.0 platform to enable developers take advantage of a rich set of new and improved technologies to build rich 32-bit connected devices that demand dynamic applications and services," said Keith White, director of the Embedded and Appliance Platform Group at Microsoft Corp. "The tools provided in BSQUARE's WinDK Xpress Kit Suite 3.0 are a great complement to Platform Builder 3.0 and will further enable embedded developers to quickly and economically develop and deploy their Windows CE 3.0-based devices."

According to a report published by Venture Development Corporation in 1999, the number of intelligent computing devices utilizing the Windows CE platform will increase from just under a million units in 1999 to more than 14 million units by 2003. These devices will benefit from the performance and efficiency of Xpress kits and well-written high performance device drivers. The new WinDK Xpress Kit Suite 3.0 for Windows CE provides the solutions needed by developers of these intelligent computing devices to reduce their development costs and their time to market.

WinDK Xpress Kit Suite Provides Integral Functionality, Fast Time-to-Market

The WinDK Xpress Kit Suite is comprised of two components: the WinDK driver development toolkit and BSQUARE's CE Xpress Binary Kits. WinDK for Windows CE is a full-featured device driver development tool for creating high performance device drivers for Windows CE. The WinDK component of the suite provides:

-- Bus Master DMA for the highest performance drivers, including hardware
scatter-gather support

-- Slave DMA support

-- Support for overlapped I/O and request queuing

-- Full enumeration of ISA, PCI and PCMCIA buses

-- A code generation Wizard that creates a complete starting point

-- Class library for rapid development

-- Device Driver sample source code and tutorial documentation

The CE Xpress Binary Kit component helps eliminate many complex and time-consuming tasks and lets the developer concentrate on developing the unique features of their devices and products. OEMs and third party developers can run application benchmarks on the target platform, perform system tradeoffs, develop hardware and software and extend the capabilities of Microsoft's Platform Builder for a faster implementation of Windows CE on a target platform. The CE Xpress Kit component consists of a series of processor and platform specific binary kits with each kit providing similar bootloader functionality and standard OAL interfaces. Each binary kit also includes a set of device drivers for controlling a range of on-board or on-chip peripherals. The binary kits include support for:

-- Xpress86 -- BIOS based x86 platforms. (CE 3.0, 2.x)

-- National Semiconductor Geode/MediaGXM. (CE 3.0, 2.x) --

Centaurus, Aries

-- Intel SA-1110 Development Board "Assabet." (CE 3.0, 2.x)

-- Motorola PowerPC 823, "Blue Planet." (CE 3.0, 2.x)

-- AMD Elan SC-400 (CE 3.0, 2.x) -- both the (mu)forCE and

Evaluation boards

-- Hitachi SH3 CardEngine. (CE 3.0, 2.x) -- Rev. A & Rev B

Price and Availability

The WinDK Xpress Kit Suite 3.0 for Windows CE is available immediately. The suggested North American price is $3,495.00 USD and comes with 90 days of product technical support. A product subscription program that provides all CD updates, additional high priority product technical support, provided by device driver engineers and developers, is also available.

About BSQUARE

BSQUARE (Nasdaq:BSQR) is innovating tomorrow's devices through software solutions for the development of intelligent computing devices. Specializing in the Microsoft Windows family of operating systems, BSQUARE supplies software products and services for the development and use of PC Companions, set-top boxes, web pads, Internet appliances, industrial automation devices, Windows-based terminals, and other mobile and wireless intelligent devices. From development tools to software infrastructures to end-user applications, the BSQUARE touch is on many intelligent Windows-based devices available in the market today.

For more information, visit BSQUARE at http://www.bsquare.com or call 888/820-4500.

BSQUARE is a registered trademark of BSQUARE Corporation. All names, product names, and tradenames are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective holders.

This release contains forward-looking statements relating to our sales that are subject to certain risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected. The words "believe," "expect," "intend," "anticipate," variations of such words, and similar expressions identify forward-looking statements, but their absence does not mean that the statement is not forward-looking. These statements are not guarantees of future performance and are subject to certain risks, uncertainties and assumptions that are difficult to predict. Factors that could affect BSQUARE's actual results include the adverse changes in BSQUARE's relationship with Microsoft, failure of the market to accept this product, a decline in the market for Windows -based intelligent computing devices or the failure of such market to develop as anticipated, delays or announcements of delays by Microsoft of Windows product releases, competition and intellectual property risks. A more detailed description of certain factors that could affect actual results include, but are not limited to, those discussed in BSQUARE's Quarterly Report on Form 10-Q, in the section entitled "Certain Factors That May Affect Future Results." Readers are cautioned not to place undue reliance on these forward-looking statements, which speak only as of the date of this release. BSQUARE undertakes no obligation to update publicly any forward-looking statements to reflect new information, events or circumstances after the date of this release or to reflect the occurrence of unanticipated events.