Quantum Effect Design Debuts as Full-Service Microprocessor Company Targeting High-End Embedded Markets; Highly-Respected MIPS-based Design House Adds Fabless Business to Market Own Products Targeted at Fast Growing High-End Embedded Markets.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Embedded Systems Conference-- Sept. 16, 1996--Leveraging the success of its 32 and 64-bit MIPS microprocessor technology, Quantum Effect Design, Inc. (QED) makes its debut today as a mainstream microprocessor vendor. The company has expanded its business strategy beyond its leading-edge design capabilities and will now design, manufacture and market its own line of MIPS-based, high-end 32 and 64-bit embedded microprocessors.

Quantum Effect Design, Inc. was founded in 1991 as a microprocessor design house. The company designed, in breakthrough time-to-volume, the core technologies of the midrange MIPS microprocessor product family -- the R4600, R4700, R4650, R4640 and R5000.

QED designed products have been widely adopted for use in workstations as well as in many embedded applications including internetworking, printers, games, Internet TV/set- top boxes/cable modems and high-speed communications devices.

QED worked closely with its manufacturing partners, IDT, NEC, NKK and Toshiba, to produce its designs.

"Today we proudly make our debut as an embedded microprocessor vendor and will no longer be Silicon Valley's `best kept secret,'" said Tom Riordan, founder, president and director of Quantum Effect Design. "The addition of the fabless semiconductor business model to our current design license model is a natural evolution for QED. With the recent acquisition of a MIPS manufacturing and sales license -- we are strongly positioned to leverage the success of our 32 and 64-bit MIPS-based product families and formally enter the high-end embedded market."

"Our technology allows the development of 32 and 64-bit embedded microprocessors that can quickly exploit advances in manufacturing technology so as to be affordable enough to drive high volumes. This class of high-performance embedded microprocessors fills a major product gap between desktop 64-bit microprocessors and legacy CISC 32-bit microprocessors and will help drive the growth of many emerging markets such as internetworking, printers, games, Internet TV/set-top box/cable modems and high-speed communications devices." said Riordan.

It is estimated that by 1999 nearly 3.5 billion microprocessors will be shipped into the embedded marketplace (The Information Architects, Los Altos, CA - 2Q `96 report). The highest growth segments of this market are forecasted to be the 64-bit segment and the highest performance quartile of the 32-bit segment, with nearly 24 million embedded microprocessors shipped in 1996 and a forecasted 32 million units shipped in 1999. It is anticipated that the combination of these two segments will generate revenue of nearly $1 billion by 1999.

"QED will be successful because they have the right products at the right time at the right price for a very fast-growing market segment, the 32/64-bit embedded," said Mike Griffith, senior analyst at In-Stat.

"QED's core technology can be quickly tuned to deliver targeted solutions for different markets and these solutions will meet the performance, volume, and pricing requirements for the embedded market. The company is lean and mean, and their business strategy makes a lot of sense."

The Design Team

Quantum Effect Design is a company built around "experts." Their engineers average more than 12 years of design experience in computer systems architecture, microprocessors and integrated circuits. The company employs more than 35 of the industry's top microprocessor design engineers.

"Our team of design engineers is unsurpassed in the industry," said Riordan. "We have become a mecca for the best and brightest engineers in Silicon Valley who want to work on leading-edge designs. It's no surprise that we're often referred to as the microprocessor design `dream team'."

Product Development - Tailoring Microprocessor Solutions to Market Requirements

Quantum Effect Design is working closely with key customers to develop a product roadmap that includes the next several generations of high-performance, cost-effective leadership products in the high-end embedded market. These solutions will be based on solving system design problems with two basic roadmaps: high-performance and low-system cost. QED envisions 300 plus MHz 64-bit microprocessors targeting high-performance and 32-bit interface microprocessors targeting low system costs.

QED's core competencies include, first and foremost, its highly-skilled staff of designers. Supporting these designers is a world-class development environment of state-of-the-art EDA tools and a mixture of custom, semi-custom and ASIC design methodologies. QED's embedded microprocessors combine the key design technologies needed to provide solutions to high-end embedded customers: full- custom datapaths for high-performance, standard-cell libraries for quick design of non-critical logic and high-performance cache memory arrays. The combination of these skills and technologies enable QED to quickly deliver new and derivative products with unparalleled time-to-volume.

QED further differentiates itself from many other vendors with its willingness to provide architecture and instruction set modifications to the base QED technology. In the past, the high-end embedded market has been required to live with less than optimal workstation hand-me-down processors whereas the market really desires solutions tailored to meet specific price/performance targets as well as a roadmap into the future. By bringing our wide range of expertise to bear, QED is well positioned to meet the long-term roadmap requirements of the marketplace.

Manufacturing Agreements

Under its recently acquired MIPS manufacturing and sales license, QED is currently in the process of selecting state-of-the-art manufacturing partners and agreements are expected to be in place by Q4 1996.

About the Company

Quantum Effect Design, Inc., founded in 1991, designs, develops and markets high-performance, cost-effective, market-driven embedded microprocessor solutions. The company designed and developed many of the 64-bit MIPS microprocessors including the popular R4600, R4700, R4650, R4640 and R5000 products.

Quantum Effect Design's future product families will include high-end, 32 and 64-bit embedded microprocessors targeted at emerging and fast-growing markets such as internetworking, printers, games, Internet TV/set-top boxes/cable modems and high-speed communications devices. The company has an unsurpassed record of designing and delivering innovative high-performance microprocessors in breakthrough time-to-volume.

Company headquarters are located in Santa Clara, California. Telephone: [phone]. World Wide Web site: http://www.qedinc.com.

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Note to Editors:

MIPS is a registered trademark of MIPS Technologies, Inc., R4600, R4700, R4650, and R4640 are trademarks of Integrated Device Technology, Inc., and R5000 is a trademark of MIPS Technologies, Inc.

CONTACT: Rick Kepple

Quantum Effect Design

408/565-0315

[e-mail]

or

Sandra McBride/Melanie Laurence

Simon/McGarry Public Relations 

408/746-0911

[e-mail]

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