Radiata and ShareWave Announce Partnership.

Business Editors/Technology Writers

SAN JOSE & EL DORADO HILLS, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Nov. 27, 2000

Companies Collaborate to Provide Customers with Industry's First

Commercially Available IEEE-802.11a Wireless Networking Solution

Radiata Inc., a privately held company at the forefront of next-generation wireless networking technology and design, and ShareWave, Inc., a provider of semiconductor technology for multimedia-capable wireless home networks, today formalized a partnership that will provide the industry's first commercially-available IEEE-802.11a wireless networking solution. IEEE-802.11a is a high-performance, 5 GHz IEEE wireless LAN standard that offers data rates of up to 54 Mbits/second. This partnership underscores both companies' commitment to enabling OEM customers to design and develop high-performance, low-cost wireless networking products for the home and enterprise environments. Radiata's portion of the solution will include its recently announced "wireless engine" -- a chipset based on the IEEE-802.11a standard that consists of a baseband modem (R-M11a) and a 5 GHz UNII band radio transceiver (R-RF5). Together, Radiata's R-M11a and R-RF5 comprise the physical layer (PHY). ShareWave will add its multimedia/quality of service (QoS)-enabled Media Access Control (MAC) technology that supports IEEE-802.11a MAC functionality. The resulting solution, PHY and MAC, will support the full spectrum of the IEEE-802.11a standard, and therefore represents a breakthrough performance improvement over existing wireless LAN solutions, such as IEEE-802.11b, which can only achieve data rates of up to 11 Mbits/second.

"Our partnership with ShareWave will allow us to broaden our customer base to support those customers in need of an external MAC solution to implement their system designs," stated Chris Fisher, vice president of sales and marketing, Radiata Inc. "By collaborating with ShareWave, customers who need a complete, turnkey systems solution will now have seamless integration of our PHY and ShareWave's MAC, thereby enabling the creation of high-capacity and cost-effective wireless networking products. Radiata's wireless engine coupled with ShareWave's MAC is ideal for customers who require both fast time-to-market of their wireless networking products and a technology solution that successfully meets the performance needs of the wireless networked home and enterprise markets."

"This partnership enables us to deliver first-to-market products that satisfy the growing customer demand for high-performance, multimedia-capable IEEE-802.11a solutions," said Bob Bennett, ShareWave vice president of corporate development. "ShareWave's and Radiata's complementary MAC and PHY solutions will help our customers deliver quick time-to-market solutions in the enterprise, SOHO and home markets and are the perfect complement to the deployment of current and future broadband services. These solutions will be the first to support advanced multimedia applications and content, such as HDTV and multiple MPEG-2 streams."

Because of Radiata's ability to integrate its "wireless engine" entirely in standard CMOS process technology, Radiata is able to provide a low-cost, high-performance wireless networking chipset for products targeted at the home, small office/home office (SOHO), enterprise and public area environments. ShareWave brings its family of multimedia/QoS-enabled IEEE-802.11a network controllers, as well as the company's Whitecap(TM) network protocol, which enables support for QoS and high-fidelity multimedia content as an extension to standard IEEE-802.11a MAC functionality.

In addition to Whitecap and IEEE-802.11a MAC functionality, ShareWave's network controllers also include forward error correction (FEC) for maximizing throughput and range, a high-speed packet engine with direct memory access (DMA) for optimizing data flow, and an ARM processor complex for running network protocols and services. ShareWave's network controllers also support a variety of external interfaces, including PCI, USB, PCMCIA, Ethernet, and a high-speed media independent interface (MII). This enables OEMs to develop a broad set of products for the enterprise, SOHO and home markets, including NICs, access points, bridges, residential gateways, networked set-top boxes and multimedia client devices.

ShareWave's Whitecap network protocol also provides these products with superior ease-of-use and reliability features, such as channel agility, open enrollment, peer-to-peer networking support and master redundancy. The fully-integrated wireless solution from Radiata and ShareWave provides customers with a complete design-in package for emerging product applications in the broadband multimedia services arena, home appliances requiring wireless networked connectivity, laptops and other portable appliances for the enterprise environment.

Radiata's wireless engine utilizes Coded Orthogonal Frequency Division Multiplexing (COFDM) instead of spread spectrum technology, thus providing wired quality connectivity in indoor environments. Also, Radiata's wireless engine utilizes a set of frequencies at 5 GHz known as the UNII (Unlicensed National Information Infrastructure) band. These frequency bands provide interference-free operation unlike the currently utilized 2.4 GHz frequency bands for IEEE-802.11b, HomeRF and Bluetooth.

About Radiata

Founded in 1997 and incorporated in the United States in late 1999, Radiata Inc. provides "wireless engines" -- high-speed, cost-effective wireless networking products for the home, small office/home office (SOHO), enterprise and public area environments. Radiata is a privately held company headquartered in San Jose, California, with research and development facilities located in Sydney, Australia. For more information about the company and its products, please call [phone] or visit www.radiata.com.

About ShareWave, Inc.

ShareWave provides semiconductor technology for multimedia-capable wireless home networks. ShareWave is privately held with its headquarters in El Dorado Hills, CA. ShareWave has received funding from APV Technology Partners, Cisco Systems, Intel Corporation, Kyushu Matsushita Electric Co., Ltd., Microsoft Corporation, Philips Electronics NV, SBC Communications, Inc., SOFTBANK Technology Ventures, Vulcan Ventures, Inc. and other public and private investors. ShareWave has announced partnership agreements with Cisco, NETGEAR, and Kyushu Matsushita Electric (for products bearing the Panasonic brand name). For more information on ShareWave and our products, visit the company's web site at www.sharewave.com.

Radiata is a trademark of Radiata Inc. Whitecap is a trademark of ShareWave, Inc. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are property of their respective owners.