TMC and Dolphin Integration enter in a partnership for microprocessor cores to enable better competitiveness in the highly price-sensitive smart-card market

Grenoble, France and Beijing, China -- February 9, 2009 - Dolphin Integration, the leading provider of Silicon IP products and TMC (Beijing Tongfang Microelectronics Co., Ltd.) announce their partnership starting with a microprocessor core.

The mass Smart-Card market is dominated by the 8-bit 8051 architecture. In a market so sensitive to chip price, it has been hard for IC companies to differentiate their ICs beyond mere cost shrinking.
The agreement with Dolphin enables TMC to benefit from a MCU core fully code-compatible with the legacy i80C51 while providing much better performances than conventional architectures cloning the 8051.

“The MCU core selected by TMC offers numerous advantages”, comments Jean-Francois Pollet, Vice President and co-founder of Dolphin Integration. “Firstly it can help save silicon area thanks to a superior code density. Secondly, it stars a much lower power consumption – approximately four times lower for the same computing power – than the best 8051 MCU core available so far.”

“We also selected the MCU core from Dolphin Integration for its reliability”, states Ryan Xu, CTO of Beijing TMC.
“This MCU core has already demonstrated its maturity, as it was used in ASICs designed for replacing standard components after their obsolescence.”

Dolphin Integration also provides a full set of software solutions and hardware development tools for ensuring the fastest Time-to-Market and thus reducing the development costs.  

Both companies now evaluate the possibility for further this partnership so as to ensure the best competitiveness for the SoCs supplied by TMC.

About Beijing Tongfang Microelectronics Co., Ltd. (TMC)
Beijing Tongfang Microelectronics Co., Ltd. a "fabless" IC design company, was founded at the end of 2001. TMC has abundant experience in digital, analogue and mixed signal IC designs. It has independently developed the key modules of radio frequency analogue circuit, micro-controller and various specific algorithm-accelerating engines. Currently, the major products of TMC are chips used in smartcards and other systems, including contact less memory card chip, contact and contact less CPU card chip, reading / writing module for contact less card reader, etc. TMC has undertaken the task of designing the Chinese second generation national ID card chip, and becomes one of the main providers.
You can be reached TMC at +86 82351818 or www.tsinghuaic.com

About Dolphin Integration
Dolphin Integration is up to their charter as the most adaptive creator in Microelectronics to "enable mixed signal Systems-on-Chip", with a quality management stimulating reactivity for innovation.
Their current mission is to supply worldwide customers with fault-free, high-yield and reliable sets of CMOS Virtual Components, resilient to noise and drastic for low power-consumption, together with engineering assistance and product evolutions customized to their needs.
More information on Microcontrollers at: http://www.dolphin.fr/rock