StarGen Receives an Additional $8.5 Million in Series D Funding.

MARLBOROUGH, Mass. -- New Investment to Finance Accelerated Development and Marketing of Advanced Switching Interconnect Technology

StarGen, a semiconductor company specializing in advanced serial switched interconnect solutions, today announced that it has secured $8.5 million in a fourth round of venture funding. Participants in this Series D round include current investors Commonwealth Capital Ventures, Eastward Capital Partners, Intel Capital, Ironside Ventures, Morgenthaler Ventures and Vesbridge Partners LLC.

StarGen will use this investment to finance accelerated development and marketing of Advanced Switching Interconnect (ASI) products. StarGen engineers have been major contributors to the emerging ASI specifications, leveraging the company's expertise in the area of switch fabric interconnects. StarGen completed a $16.3 million Series C in 2003, and raised $26 million in previous rounds.

"StarGen's rapid growth continues as marked by this new round of funding, the success of our StarFabric business, and the aggressive investment in Advanced Switching Interconnect development and marketing," said Tim Miller, CEO of StarGen. "We have been very encouraged by the level of new design activity around our StarFabric technology and the enthusiastic customer validation of our Advanced Switching portfolio."

"StarGen has repeatedly demonstrated the viability of its vision and ability to execute its plan," said Zenas Hutcheson, senior managing director of Vesbridge Partners and member of StarGen's board of directors. "We are excited by the momentum gathering around Advanced Switching, and we firmly believe StarGen will emerge as a leader in the market for Advanced Switching silicon solutions."

StarGen has experienced widespread adoption of StarFabric, having sold over two hundred thousand StarFabric ports to more than 50 customers worldwide with design wins across a broad spectrum of markets including storage, communications, high performance imaging, automated test, and video distribution, among many others. StarFabric is a low cost, easy to adopt, customer tested, switched interconnect technology that is solving real world problems today in customers production systems. With its complete StarFabric product line including the SG1010 StarFabric Switch, the SG2010 PCI-to-StarFabric Bridge, and SG 3010 TDM-to-StarFabric Bridge, StarGen has continued to be a leader in providing solutions to embedded and communication equipment OEMs.

StarGen has leveraged the experience and expertise gained through StarFabric to develop its new StarXpress product line, slated for delivery in early 2005, comprising a family of bridges and switches based on the emerging PCI Express and Advanced Switching industry standards. This new portfolio provides high bandwidth serial switched interconnect solutions for next-generation communication, storage, server, and embedded system designs that require solutions for backplane scalability, peer-to-peer computing, multiple protocols, flexible topologies, and high bandwidth/low latency performance. StarGen has been a major driver in the development of the Advanced Switching specifications that will define the important next-generation interconnect standard for storage, blade server, embedded and communications equipment, and is a sponsor of the newly formed Advanced Switching Interconnect Special Interest Group (ASI SIG).

About StarGen

StarGen, a semiconductor company providing advanced serial switched interconnect solutions for compute and communications equipment, is a leading designer of low-overhead, protocol-agnostic, open standards-based serial switched architectures, which enable system designers to bring new capabilities to their system while using existing standards-based parts. StarGen's StarFabric product line benefits vendors of embedded systems needing enhanced switched PCI capability as well as vendors of access communication platforms for voice, data, and video networks. StarGen is also developing StarXpress, a complementary line of products built on the Advanced Switching standard and compatible with PCI Express(TM). These products will be significant solutions for blade server, storage, and mid-range communications applications. StarGen's switched interconnect products provide a dramatic increase in equipment performance, scalability, reliability, and Quality of Service while maintaining backward compatibility to existing standards-based hardware and software. StarGen (www.stargen.com) is headquartered in Marlborough, MA.

Note to editors: PCI Express is a trademark of PCI-SIG. StarGen, StarFabric, and StarXpress are trademarks of StarGen. All other trademarks and products are the property of their respective owners.