Sequence, Faraday, NemoChips Team To Slash Over 50% Of Total Power From Advanced Mobile Processor Design

Santa Clara, Calif. -- September 11, 2008 -- Pairing Sequence Design's PowerTheater, and the low-power design expertise of NemoChips and Faraday Technology Corporation, led to a 52 percent reduction in total power for an advanced mobile processor design.

NemoChips recently taped out its next-generation processor, designed jointly with Faraday's SoCompiler Design Services, that ushers in a new era in mobile computing with ultra-high performance for streaming HD video, and power usage as much as 10X less than its closest competitor. NemoChips is an emerging leader in low-power multimedia platform ICs.

NemoChips designers scored their biggest power savings early in the design cycle thanks to PowerTheater's prowess in RTL power analysis and power prototyping where Sequence estimates as much as 80 percent of total power savings can be realized.

"By leveraging the best design talent, methodologies, and tools we have achieved this significant low-power design milestone," said NemoChips President Dr. Lifeng Zhao. "Our customers are building portable technologies with unprecedented features and battery life, and look to us to provide them with the right silicon to meet market requirements."

"The Faraday PowerSmart™ design flow speeds the development of low-power technologies using industry-standard flows along with best-in-class tools such as PowerTheater," according to Joseph Hong, General Manager for the U.S., Faraday Technology. "This combination gives our design center customers consistently superior results and fast time to market."

"High performance and low power are expected by today's consumer," said Sequence President and CEO Vic Kulkarni. "It is amazing to see how far we can continue to push the envelope to meet these demands, and what can be accomplished when the skills and talents of multiple companies like Sequence, Faraday, and NemoChips come together."

About PowerTheater/PowerTheater-Explorer

PowerTheater is the industry's first RTL power analysis and power prototyping solution with the singular ability to accurately analyze power at RTL and support power management techniques such as voltage islands, mixed voltage threshold, power gating, and clock gating. PowerTheater recently added support for the Si2 CPF standard along with the following new features:

• Control all aspects of running PowerTheater through a single Tcl-based command file.
• Identify high-power windows utilizing comprehensive simulations from hardware accelerators.
• Compute full-chip, gate-level power efficiently using RTL simulations.
• Prevent voltage-drop related test and functional failures by automatically identifying critical vectors from multiple simulations.

PowerTheater-Explorer is an innovative capability that adds state-of-the art power visualization and debugs features for fast, interactive RTL power analysis. A new SmartSource Viewer allows designers to determine hot spots in the design, to visualize, debug and interactively analyze a design's power consumption. The hierarchical RTL power tree display shows hot spots that can be cross-probed to schematics, showing connectivity and indicating how activity is moving through the design and how instances impact one another. These results can be displayed and analyzed at RTL, gate, or mixed levels of abstraction. SmartSource also provides a dedicated view of the clock tree for fast analysis and tracing of clock nets in the design.

For more information, visit: www.sequencedesign.com/solutions/powertheater.php.

About NemoChips Inc.

NemoChips Inc. is a fabless semiconductor start-up established at the beginning of 2007. The company is headquartered in Silicon Valley with development centers in Fremont USA and Shanghai China. The company focuses on developing next generation mobile application processor SoC that could provide DVD quality audio and video for future handheld device. The SoC is fully programmable that could support most major video standards up to 720p 30fps video decoding with very low power consumption. An open software platform is also built around this chip to provide a complete solution for portable multi-media devices including smart phones, PDA, DPF and PMP etc. For more information, please visit : www.nemochips.com.

About Sequence

Sequence Design's Design For Power (DFP) solutions accelerate the ability of SoC designers to bring high-performance, power-aware ICs quickly to market. Sequence's power and signal-integrity software give customers the competitive advantage necessary to excel in aggressive technology markets. Sequence is an active participant in industry organizations advancing low-power design technologies such as the Power Forward Initiative and holds a seat on the board of Si2. For more information: sequencedesign.com.

About Faraday Technology Corporation

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad silicon IP portfolio includes Cell Library ,Memory Compiler, ARM-compliant CPUs, DDRII, MPEG4, H.264, USB 2.0, 10/100 Ethernet, Serial ATA, PCI Express, and UWB . With 2007 revenue of US$ 156 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other world-wide markets. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit : www.faraday-tech.com.