STMicroelectronics Doubles Shipments of 32-bit Embedded RISC Processors; ST20-based Products Shipped In 2000 Exceed 30 Million.

Business Editors

GENEVA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Feb. 7, 2001

STMicroelectronics, a world leading supplier of system-on-chip solutions to the digital consumer market, has announced record shipments of its ST20 family of 32-bit VL-RISC cores. More than 30 million ST20-based devices were shipped during 2000, targeted primarily at set-top box and DVD applications, a figure that represents a one hundred per cent increase over 1999.

"ST's position as a market leader in digital consumer ICs has continued to grow apace with accelerating market demand for products such as set-top boxes, DVD players and Digital TV," said Philippe Lambinet, Group Vice President and General Manager of the Digital Video Division at ST. "Shipments of ST20-based products into these applications have doubled year on year for the past four years and today ST is the leading supplier of processors for set-top boxes, with more than 50% market share."

The ST20 RISC microprocessor core was specially engineered to reduce total system cost in high-volume embedded applications. Notable features include an integral hardware micro kernel with multi-priority process scheduling, trap/exception handling, I/O, DMA, interrupt and timer support and fast context switching. In addition, the use of a variable length instruction format leads to superior code density, thereby minimizing the cost of the program memory.

The ST20 core is featured in ST's highly successful OMEGA (STi55xx) family of back-end chips for set-top boxes and DVD players, where devices such as the STi5518 integrate in a single chip a transport demultiplex block, an ST20 system CPU, an audio/video MPEG-2 decoder, display and graphics functions, a digital video encoder, and system peripherals. The ST20 is also featured in ST's two-chip Global Positioning by Satellite (GPS) solution, in digital cameras and in devices for use in consumer broadband products and PC cards.

All ST20-based products are supported by a leading edge software development chain, which includes the well-proven ST20 ANSI C software toolset, ST20 window-based debugging toolkit and a royalty-free high-performance real-time operating system (OS/20).

About STMicroelectronics

STMicroelectronics (formerly SGS-THOMSON Microelectronics) is a global independent semiconductor company, whose shares are traded on the New York Stock Exchange, on the ParisBourse and on the Milan Stock Exchange. The Company designs, develops, manufactures and markets a broad range of semiconductor integrated circuits (ICs) and discrete devices used in a wide variety of microelectronic applications, including telecommunications systems, computer systems, consumer products, automotive products and industrial automation and control systems. In 2000, the Company's net revenues were $7,813.2 million and net earnings were $1,452.1 million. Further information on ST can be found at www.st.com.