Rocketchips First to demonstrate licensable analog IEEE 1394 PHY in Pure-Play Foundry Process

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Rocketchips First to demonstrate licensable analog IEEE 1394 PHY in Pure-Play Foundry Process

MINNEAPOLIS, MN (June 1, 1999) -- RocketChips, Inc. (www.rocketchips.com) a designer of high-speed, high-performance analog and mixed-signal integrated circuits (ICs) and related intellectual property (IP) cores, has demonstrated a licensable analog IEEE 1394-compliant CMOS physical layer transceiver (PHY) in the process of a pure-play CMOS foundry, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC). RocketChips believes that it is the first Intellectual Property provider to achieve a working, licensable analog PHY that is not captive to a proprietary foundry.

RocketChips initiated this design project in July 1998, with the announcement of an IP core licensing agreement with Faraday Technology Corp. to develop an IEEE 1394 compliant silicon CMOS transceiver to operate at 400 Mbps. This was the first announcement of an IEEE 1394-compliant CMOS transceiver to be available as a virtual component. Faraday has been responsible for the back-end chip implementation, fabrication and testing of the 1394 PHY through the UMC foundry.

"Demonstrating a licensable analog 1394 PHY for fabrication in pure-play foundries is an important milestone," said Robert Keller, Vice President of Business Development for RocketChips. "It demonstrates the progress we are making toward our goal to introduce the complete PHY as a licensable IP core and IC product."

RocketChips, Inc. designs, develops and licenses high-performance, high-bandwidth intellectual property (IP) components for use in "Systems-on-a-Chip" and other complex integrated circuits (ICs). The Company markets these components or "cores" under the trademark "RocketIP™" for a wide-range of applications in wired and wireless communications systems worldwide.

RocketChips maintains its corporate headquarters and Wireless IC Design Center in Minneapolis and other IC Design Centers in Ames, Iowa, and Austin, Texas.