Chip Express Strengthens Large Gate-Count ASIC Product Offering.

Business Editors/High-Tech Writers

DesignCon 2002

SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 28, 2002

Chip Express today announced the immediate availability of the CX4551, a 550K ASIC gate masterslice, equivalent to approximately 2 million FPGA gates. Fabricated in UMC's stable 0.25um technology, the metal programmable Modular Array(TM) product is ideal for both ground-up ASIC manufacture and for Xilinx and Altera 0.18um FPGA device conversions. The Modular Array technology offers fast product turnaround and significant cost advantages over standard cell equivalent technology.

Chip Express' foundry partner, UMC, manufactures the base wafers up to the completion of the third metal layer, at which point the material is banked awaiting the final customization metal layers. Chip Express accepts the logic design from the customer and creates the top two metal layers, which UMC uses to customize the ASIC.

This two-stage approach benefits the customer in several ways, including a reduction in the lithography tooling costs by a factor of 10:1, a savings of at least $90K per design over the standard cell equivalent. By holding wafers in an almost finished state, Chip Express can also deliver completed prototypes in less than 3 weeks, shaving up to 8 weeks from the typical standard cell ASIC prototype manufacturing cycle.

"A growing number of FPGA conversion opportunities seem to be cropping up as systems vendors, particularly in the communications space, try to draw down their material costs for systems already in production," said Doug Bailey, VP Marketing for Chip Express. "Our new product not only includes enough gates to address most of the conversion market, but also includes LVDS transceivers and fast embedded memories required by the networking and telecom systems community."

Chip Express supports Synopsys and Cadence ASIC tool flows, as well as the Synplicity and Exemplar flows more familiar to FPGA designers transitioning to hard-wired ASICs.

"Simulation and synthesis libraries are available free from our website, so customers are able to synthesize and optimize their own designs, or they can pass the VHDL/Verilog description to us and we'll do the work for them," said Bailey. "We accept standard input formats from our customers, and then present a standard fabless semiconductor interface to the foundry."

The 0.25um Modular Array technology offers a step up in performance over older standard cell technologies and the 0.18um FPGA equivalents. Chip Express' embedded SRAM blocks have a 2.5ns access time (450MHz operation) and the process supports equally fast logic with typical 32 bit RISC data paths operating in excess of 100MHz.

Pricing and Availability

Using the new technology, Chip Express can deliver a 550K gate ASIC with almost half a megabit of on-board memory for less than $70,000 in NRE and $30 per chip in 10,000 unit quantities. Chip Express is now accepting design starts for the entire CX4000 product line.

About Chip Express

Chip Express is the leading manufacturer of fast-turn ASICs (Application Specific Integrated Circuits). The company's innovative, patented technology also enables consolidation of tooling associated with wafer manufacture, reducing both time-to-market and initial production cost by a factor of ten over that available using competitive techniques. Headquartered in Santa Clara, Calif., Chip Express is a privately held corporation, founded in the U.S. in 1989.

This press release contains forward-looking statements based on current information available to Chip Express Corporation as of the date hereof. These statements are based on Management's current expectations and may ultimately prove to be incorrect. Factors which could cause future results to differ materially from the results discussed, implied, or forecasted in the forward-looking statements include delays in scheduled product availability dates (which could result from various occurrences including development or testing difficulties, software errors, shortages in appropriately skilled engineers and project management problems); the risks inherent in the commercialization of the Company's anticipated products and services; shifts in customer or market demand for the Company's anticipated products; the impact of competitive products and pricing; and possible disruptive effects of organizational changes, including retaining key personnel and coordinating operations. Chip Express Corp. assumes no obligation to revise or update any forward-looking statements contained in this press release.

Chip Express Corp. All other products or service names mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.