ChipX Purchases OKI's U.S. ASIC Business Assets and Signs Business Collaboration Agreement

Update: GigOptix, Inc. Announces Acquisition of ChipX (November 10, 2009)

ChipX and Oki Semiconductor collaborate in sharing Oki Semiconductor’s technology, libraries and foundry services for worldwide market

Santa Clara – February 20, 2007 -- ChipX Inc., provider of differentiated ASIC solutions, today announced it has signed an agreement with Oki Semiconductor Company, a division of Oki America Inc.,  regarding an asset purchase and business collaboration. 

Pursuant to the agreement, the entire Oki Semiconductor  U.S. ASIC engineering team, ASIC specialists and marketing personnel have joined ChipX.  This transaction will boost ChipX’s ASIC team capabilities and enable it to become a broad-based ASIC company with a broad product offering of embedded arrays, gate arrays, structured ASICs and standard cell ASICs.  The combined company will have a track record of having executed and delivered more than 2000 ASIC designs over the past 20 years, with an outstanding percentage of first time working silicon.

As a result of the collaboration between the two companies, Oki Semiconductor has become a turnkey foundry for ChipX and has licensed its embedded array and Gate array technology and internally developed IP to ChipX.  Oki Semiconductor has assigned all of its U.S. ASIC product backlog to ChipX and has contracted the completion of the ongoing customer designs to ChipX.

“We were very impressed with Oki Semiconductor’s ASIC team capabilities and are looking forward to their contributions to our worldwide ASIC business”, said Amnon Fisher, ChipX’s President and CEO.  “Our customers will now have access to a broader ASIC offering enabling us to service all their ASIC needs and continue to speed their time to market.”

“We are confident that our US customers will be well supported by ChipX and will benefit from ChipX’s Structured ASIC offering”, said Masaharu Ozawa, President and COO of Oki Semiconductor. “We are excited about our collaboration with ChipX and look forward to a long and mutually beneficial relationship.”

For more information, visit www.chipx.com or call +1 408 988 2445

About ChipX

ChipX, Inc. is a pioneer and leader in the development and manufacturing of differentiated ASIC solutions, including Structured ASIC and Embedded Array technology.  The company's innovative, patented technology consolidates wafer production tooling, reduces time-to-market and minimizes the total cost to profit. ChipX products are widely used in consumer equipment, computing peripherals, communication systems, industrial control, medical equipment, instrumentation and military/aerospace systems. For more information about ChipX broad range of ASIC solutions, please visit www.chipx.com.  Headquartered in Santa Clara, CA, ChipX is a privately held corporation, founded in the U.S. in 1989. A subsidiary, ChipX (Israel) Ltd., performs Research & Development. Investors include Elron Electronic Industries, Ltd. (NASDQ: ELRN), VantagePoint Venture Partners, Wasserstein Venture Capital, Newlight Associates, Parker Price Venture Capital, UMC, Needham Capital Partners and Insite Capital.

About Oki Semiconductor

Building on Oki's century-long commitment to communications technologies and markets, Oki Semiconductor designs and markets a broad line of advanced integrated circuits for telecommunications, network, automotive, computer and consumer products. Oki's product lines include telecommunications, RF, laser, networking, speech synthesis, ASIC, microcontroller and memory devices, offered in a variety of creative packages. Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Oki Semiconductor is a division of Oki America Inc., which is a subsidiary of Oki Electric Industry Co, Ltd. Oki has ISO-9000-certified manufacturing facilities in Japan and Thailand. Information on Oki Semiconductor and its products is available at www.okisemi.com/us .