New company champions open source DSP solutions for 3G and personal multimedia devices

Leuven Belgium, 12 June 2001 - Spin-off of Philips Semiconductors' DSP (Digital Signal Processing) activities and merger with Frontier Design creates ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES, a company offering open, licensable, embedded DSP technologies for the high-volume consumer electronics industry

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Royal Philips Electronics, and Frontier Design, announced today the formation of a new company called ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES. Combining Philips Semiconductors' expertise in embedded DSP architectures with Frontier Design's DSP-oriented EDA (Electronic Design Automation) tools and applications knowledge, ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES will meet market demand for embedded open-system architectures on which next generation wireless and personal multimedia products can be built.

"The availability of embedded DSP technology, design software and applications IP from one independent company is a new and unique offering to the global embedded DSP marketplace," said Theo Claasen, Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Philips Semiconductors. "By offering open licensable DSP cores and technology, ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES will be freeing customers from the many silicon-vendor specific DSP solutions that still pervade the industry."

Herman Beke, Chief Operating Officer of ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES and former Chief Executive Officer (CEO) of Frontier Design, added: "Wireless and portable multimedia devices will remain a major growth opportunity for the electronics industry. These devices will require massive processing power to accommodate future applications, but will still have to run on batteries. The only practical solution is to combine a high-performance DSP with application-optimized co-processors. ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES will be unique in offering all the hardware and software IP necessary to create such solutions."

DSP expert Will Strauss of Forward Concepts, explained, "The DSP market is driven by digital wireless applications, including Internet enabled PDAs and mobile phones. New Internet-based features, that fully support browsers, video, GPS, Bluetooth and MP3, will require an immense increase in throughput, without any increase in power consumption. Essentially this means that DSP cores will have to be combined with a variety of highly optimized coprocessors and/or accelerators. The company resulting from the merger of Frontier Design with Philips R.E.A.L. DSP division is the first one formed specifically to combine application specific co-processor technology with a high-performance DSP core and a design methodology to marry the two in ultra high performance, ultra low power applications."

The initial technology at the heart of ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES' total DSP solutions will be Philips Semiconductors' R.E.A.L. DSP embedded processor technology. Targeted at high-volume consumer applications such as high-performance digital audio players and 3G mobile terminals, this technology enables manufacturers to develop low-cost, feature-rich, software-driven consumer devices for the digital convergence era. Frontier Design brings complementary sales, marketing, design and application know-how plus its portfolio of C-language-based application-specific DSPWare (tm) IP and the A|RT (tm) design methodology.

ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES will carry out three types of activity: First, it will develop a family of DSP cores and associated hardware and software IP. Second, it will provide software, tools, and design methodologies for embedded DSP solutions. Third, it will provide design services to facilitate rapid integration of the DSP IP into customers' System-on-Chip solutions.

The new company will employ 35 people from Philips Semiconductors' existing Embedded Processors Department (EPD), together with all (50) Frontier Design's personnel. The management team of ADELANTE TECHNOLOGIES will comprise senior individuals from both Philips Semiconductors and Frontier Design. A CEO is yet to be appointed and will be recruited either internally or from the electronics industry.

Philips Semiconductors background

Philips Semiconductors, which had annual revenues of approximately US$6.3 billion in 2000, designs and manufactures semiconductors and silicon systems platforms. Philips Semiconductors is spearheading the emerging field of systems on silicon solutions with the innovative Nexperia (tm) platform and VLSI Velocity (tm) tool set. The company's Sea-of-IP (tm) design methodology allows plug and play intellectual property blocks for easily customizable products. The company is a leader in communications, consumer, PC peripherals and automotive semiconductors, which are key applications for convergence in end-user products. Philips Semiconductors is headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, and has operations throughout the world. For more information: www.semiconductors.philips.com.

Frontier Design background

Frontier Design is a leading provider of C-language based system level hardware design tools, complex intellectual property cores, designed with these tools, and advanced SoC design services.

The company's A|RT (tm) Designer architectural synthesis tool allows for the automated and/or interactive creation of highly optimized ASIC or FPGA blocks, starting from a behavioral description of a DSP algorithm in the C-language. Various architectures may be explored quickly and analyzed to achieve improvements of up to 90% in performance and/or power consumption. Designer productivity and design re-usability are substantially enhanced.

Frontier Design's portfolio of intellectual property blocks includes highly optimized implementations of turbocoders, speech recognition, ADPCM for VoIP, MPEG, and others. The company offers design services for the creation and integration of IP in systems-on-chips (SoCs). A|RT is a trademark of Frontier Design.