QLogic Arms SCSI Market with End-to-End Family of Ultra3 Solutions.

COSTA MESA, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Oct. 12, 1999--

QLogic Corp. (Nasdaq:QLGC), an industry leading designer of advanced, high-performance I/O controllers for direct connect and storage network interfaces, announced today the immediate availability of its comprehensive family of Ultra3 SCSI products for manufacturers of servers, workstations, storage controllers and peripheral devices. QLogic's Ultra3 product line-up includes the TEC480 series of hard drive controller chips, the ISP12160A PCI-to-Ultra3 dual-channel SCSI controller chips, and the QLA12160 series of dual-channel host bus adapters.

By providing system, storage and peripheral manufacturers with high-speed SCSI solutions that share a common core logic, QLogic provides customers with a proven set of building blocks that enable them to bring optimal-performance, interoperable products to market quickly and confidently.

"With a rich history of numerous SCSI innovations including the first SCSI processor, QLogic offers the most comprehensive range of SCSI connection products in the market," said Mark Edwards, vice president of sales for QLogic. "As the first and only company delivering Ultra3 solutions ranging from motherboard controllers and host bus adapters to hard drive controllers, QLogic's experience and knowledge enable it to bring the newest SCSI technologies to market quickly and effectively."

All of QLogic's new Ultra3 products offer significant performance and reliability advantages over legacy SCSI, providing data transfer rates of up to 160 MBytes per second, using double-edge clocking. Cyclical redundancy checking ensures higher integrity of transferred data and increases overall reliability, while domain validation ensures correct configuration of all devices on the bus, and allows the highest possible data transfer rate.

"As a leading supplier of RAID controllers for system OEMs and the distribution channel, DPT requires superior performance, reliability and interoperability at a very cost-effective price," said Steve Goldman, president of Distributed Processing Technology (DPT). "QLogic not only meets these requirement but also provides a complete family of interface controllers that are highly compatible, thus reducing implementation risk and increasing overall reliability for our customers. Benefits like these are the reason DPT continues to work closely with QLogic to develop innovative RAID products for our server and storage OEM customers, and distribution partners alike."

"Because of the significant performance and reliability advantages, Ultra3 SCSI is widely applicable throughout the enterprise, from workstations to the data center," said Paul Hansen, vice president, Storage Products Group, Fujitsu Computer Products of America. "Leveraging QLogic's SCSI expertise and our long-standing relationship with the company, Fujitsu is able to consistently deliver industry-leading hard disk drive technologies to support a full range of application requirements."

Ultra3 SCSI-to-PCI Storage Controllers for Servers, Workstations and Storage QLogic Ultra3 SCSI controllers maximize system efficiency and scalability by offloading I/O management functions from the CPU to the controller. By using an on-chip RISC processor to manage both the I/O activity and the host system interface, QLogic's Ultra3 SCSI controllers allow the system to perform more user-application work.

QLogic's Ultra3 series controllers offer an easy, pin-compatible upgrade path from previous-generation Ultra2 SCSI products, resulting in seamless integration and minimal changes as customers migrate to this highly-efficient interface. Host software is also compatible between the Ultra2 and Ultra3 SCSI generations. As with all QLogic parallel SCSI products, the Ultra3 series products share a common host software architecture with the company's award-winning Fibre Channel product line. This results in minimal changes when migrating firmware and host software between parallel SCSI and Fibre Channel applications.

TEC480 Series Hard Drive Controllers

The TEC480 series is the latest addition to QLogic's widely used Triple Embedded Controller family of single-chip hard disk drive controllers. By building on proven technology, the TEC480 series capitalizes on existing customer hardware and firmware investments and meets the information industry's demands for dramatically increased I/O bandwidth while supporting off-disk data rates for at least the next two generations of hard disk drives.

Designed for use in high-performance embedded SCSI disk drives, the TEC480 series combines an off-disk data rate of up to 90 Mbytes/sec, advanced on-the-fly error correction up to 40 bytes, and an embedded Ultra3 SCSI processor supporting transfer rates up to 160 Mbytes/sec.

The product also features an innovative embedded intelligent RISC sequencer, which significantly improves SCSI execution flexibility and speed while reducing drive microprocessor overhead.

FAS Series Controllers

To complete the full range of peripheral applications, QLogic will shortly announce an Ultra3 version of its popular FAS family of products, thus extending 160 Mbytes-per-second transfer rates to a wide variety of general purpose peripheral devices, including tape drives, RAID controllers, DVDs and scanners. Available in the first quarter of 2000, this product will offer a seamless hardware and firmware upgrade from QLogic's widely used Ultra2 FAS466 product.

About QLogic

QLogic Corporation is a leading designer and supplier of semiconductor and board-level I/O and enclosure management products. The company's products provide high-performance interface connections for computer systems and their attached data storage peripherals, such as hard disk drives, tape drives and RAID subsystems. In addition, QLogic provides enclosure management products that monitor and communicate management information related to components that are critical to computer system and storage subsystem reliability and availability. QLogic's highly integrated, fully featured solutions are targeted at the computer system, storage device and storage subsystem marketplaces. QLogic Customers include: AMI, Compaq, Dell, DPT, Fujitsu, Hitachi, IBM, Mylex, Quantum, Raidtec, Siemens, Sun and Unisys. The company is utilizing its expertise to develop products for emerging standards such as Fibre Channel and Ultra3 SCSI, as well as, SAF-TE, SES, and IPMI enclosure management solutions. For more information about QLogic and its product lines, contact QLogic Corp., 3545 Harbor Blvd., Costa Mesa, CA 92626; telephone: [phone] (sales); 714/438-2200 (corporate); fax: [phone]; home page http://www.qlc.com.

With the exception of historical information, the statements set forth above include forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties. The Company wishes to advise readers that a number of important factors could cause actual results to differ materially from those in the forward-looking statements. Those factors include new and changing technologies and customer acceptance of those technologies; a change in semiconductor foundry capacity or conditions; fluctuations in the growth of I/O markets; fluctuations or cancellations in orders from OEM customers; the Company's ability to compete effectively with other companies; cancellation of OEM products associated with design wins; and reductions in the need for space and increased costs of operations due to facility relocation. Carrying additional expansion space may increase costs and adversely impact future earnings. These and other factors which could cause actual results to differ materially are also discussed in the company's filings with the Securities and Exchange Commission, including its recent filings on Form S-3, Form 10-K, and Form 10-Q.

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