Blue Wave Systems Unveils Industry's Broadest Line of C6000 Based Board Level Products.

CARROLLTON, Texas--(BUSINESS WIRE)--June 30, 1998--Blue Wave Systems (NASDAQ:BWSI), the result of a merger between Mizar, Inc. and Loughborough Sound Images Ltd., today unveiled plans for the industry's most comprehensive range of board level products based on the fixed (TMS320C6201) and floating (TMS320C6701) point versions of Texas Instruments' flagship C6000 DSP.

The product line initially includes fourteen distinct products, carefully defined to satisfy the cost and performance requirements of the primary C6x target markets. These include telecommunications (wired and wireless), image processing and defense. This unprecedented breadth of products encompasses PCI, Compact PCI and VME, together with the capability to offer a spectrum of ruggedization levels.

Blue Wave introduced the world's first C6x board, the PCI/C6200, 15 months ago, nine months ahead of its nearest competitor. The PCI/C6200 development board provided customers with a rapid entry to C6000 development and, to date,300 boards have been shipped. To help customers adopt this latest technology early, Blue Wave has initiated another industry first by introducing an Evolution upgrade program.This program offers customers a free upgrade to a later revision of the board and silicon, when it becomes available.

Joining the PCI/C6200 this year will be six new products. Each product can be specified with either a fixed or floating point (when available) version of the C6000 enabling it to address a multitude of market segments. Blue Wave System's historical leadership in advanced DSP products, together with extensive experience with the C6000, and strong working relationship with customers, has enabled the company to bring a product range to market that provides the industry's most complete solution to today's high performance signal processing applications.

Although these boards offer specialized peripherals and architectures optimized for their particular application area, they all share a common heritage allowing customers to easily transition between family members as required. The Evolution program caters to this natural migration between evaluation/development boards and the final deployable boards. The evolution program also caters to customers wishing to move between fixed and floating versions of the boards.

"The DSP industry is rapidly maturing," stated Keith Burgess, Blue Wave System's Chief Technology Officer. "Increasingly, customers are interested in products that solve specific problems rather than simply giving access to leading edge technology. In recognition of this, Blue Wave is committed to providing solutions that go well beyond offering only a well designed DSP resource board to include appropriate software, I/O, and support services targeted to specific OEM applications."

Blue Wave Systems' new product range provides a solution for each major sector of board level user of the C6000 DSP:

`Wired' Telecom

Quad C6201 PCI and Compact PCI solutions for `wired' telecom systems, e.g. transcoder engines. Options include on-board line interface cards and integrated support for H100 and H110 speech buses.

`Wireless' Telecom

Quad C6201 PCI and Compact PCI boards targeted at `wireless' telecom systems based on standards including GSM, CDMA, TDMA and W-CDMA. The range includes support products such as analog converter boards and digital down converter sets.

Medical & General Imaging

Dual and quad C6201 or C6701 PCI, Compact PCI and VME boards optimized for the pipelined architectures commonly used. Peripherals include framegrabbers and high speed digital interfaces. Specific applications include X Ray, Ultrasound, MRI and CT.

Test and Measurement

Single and dual C6701 PCI boards. These are complemented by an extensive range of I/O boards enabling solutions to many diverse Test and Measurement applications including Noise and Vibration analysis, Automotive shaker tables and Non-destructive test systems.

ELINT and SigInt

Electronic Intelligence and Signal Intelligence are two very large sectors within the defense market. A range of 4 processor C6201 and C6701 Compact PCI and VME solutions are available to meet the specific needs of this sector. These needs include high speed I/O interfaces from digital receiver sub-systems together with high performance inter-processor communication for large multi-processing requirements.

Military and Aerospace

Array processing systems such as Sonar and RADAR require a high degree of inter-processor support. Blue Wave Systems has conducted several in-depth studies enabling the Company to provide unprecedented flexibility of the inter-processor communications for these applications.

Blue Wave Systems' years of experience providing rugged solutions to the military enables the Company to address the needs of programs throughout their life cycle, including the deployment phase rather than just the demonstrator.

"The unprecedented breadth of the product line is a direct consequence of the merger of Mizar and Loughborough Sound Images, and tangible evidence of the synergies it tapped," said Joe Andrulis, VP Marketing. "The range of application expertise and engineering skills required to define and execute this product plan was simply not available to the companies operating independently. Furthermore, our truly global operation allows Blue Wave to offer its customers a level and variety of support no competitor can match."

The C6x product line was defined with close cooperation between the US and UK based Marketing and Engineering groups, and both facilities will be involved in product development, marketing and manufacturing.

"We are excited by the remarkable potential of the C6000 family of DSPs and are fully committed to developing products that make this potential fully available to all our customers. We are already very strong in the C40 and SHARC board level arena and were first to market with a C6x development board. This product development plan will ensure a continuation of our C6x success story," concluded Joe Andrulis.

Blue Wave Systems (NASDAQ/NMS:BWSI) is the world's leading supplier of DSP solutions and provides digital signal processing (DSP) boards and subsystems to more than one-half of the world's top 40 companies.Blue Wave Systems is principally involved in the development and sale of embedded DSP computers for a variety of industries, with a strategic focus on telecommunications, defense, instrumentation and medical imaging. The Company works closely with the top manufacturers and independent software companies to develop and manufacture the most revolutionary PCI/PC and VME DSP boards to support the latest in DSP chip technology.The Company resulted from the successful merger of Loughborough Sound Images, Ltd. and Mizar, Inc. in April 1998.

This press release contains forward-looking statements which are based on expectations of the company but involve a number of risks and uncertainties including, but not limited to, rapid technological change, quarterly fluctuations, integration of Mizar and Loughborough Sound Images, dependence on the defense industry, relationship with Texas Instruments/Raytheon, commercial market uncertainties, dependence on key suppliers and employees, competition, and Year 2000 compliance. The foregoing list should not be construed as exhaustive and the Company disclaims any obligation subsequently to revise forward-looking statements to reflect unanticipated events. For a further explanation of risk factors please see the Company's most recent SEC filings. The Company further cautions users who may utilize published bookings and backlog information as tools to forecast the Company's revenue during a given timeframe since certain purchase orders may be subject to cancellation and/or revision to delivery schedules.

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