Oki Semiconductor Announces Industry's First Dual-Core Standard Product Based on ARM and DSP Cores for MP3 Players

Sunnyvale, Calif., April 14, 2003 -- Oki Semiconductor, a leading technology partner for the new era of digital communications and convergence, today debuted the industry's first standard ARM Powered® MCU with an MP3 audio processing engine, specifically targeted at the growing markets for MP3/WMA (Windows Media Audio) and speech processing applications. The Oki ML675200 Application Specific Standard Product (ASSP) microcontroller series incorporates an advanced dual processor architecture with an ARM7™ family 32-bit core and DSP Group's Teak™ 16-bit core, offering users high performance and a low cost of entry into the ARM product family.

Oki is the first company to offer a standard single-chip MP3 solution with dual ARM core and DSP core, providing system designers with a standard solution that cuts down on development costs, shortens development time, and does not require any up-front ASIC investment. Adopters of the Oki solution gain access to a wide range of available ARM software development tools and support, enabling them to effectively meet the needs of a wide variety of customer requirements.

The ML675200 is part of Oki's expanding line of ARM® core-based solutions designed to bring ARM technology to the broader embedded market. Available in ROM-less and Flash ROM versions, the new Oki ASSP MCUs based on the ARM core, represent a significant breakthrough in providing designers with innovative solutions that offer outstanding performance at an affordable entry price with all of the benefits of ARM industry support.

"Today's announcement is a significant proof point in Oki's commitment to delivering innovative, timely and powerful ARM core-based solutions to its customers," said Mitchell Le, senior product marketing manager of MCU products, Oki Semiconductor. "As Oki's first ARM core-based standard products for audio applications, the ML675200 series of Digital Audio Controllers deliver a total solution that reduces time and cost of development, as well as meets customer performance requirements."

The ARM7TDMI® core provides 32-bit processing power for application-level software with access to all of the device's general-purpose I/Os. Simultaneously, the 16-bit DSP core offers the numerical processing power dedicated to repetitive tasks such as MP3/WMA decoding. Oki offers a complete software solution stack along with a Software Development Kit to ease system development of MP3 players.

"ARM has welcomed this opportunity to be a key component in Oki's ML675200 Digital Audio Controllers, and to have achieved industry-first standard product status with Oki in the expanding area of MP3 players," said Neil Robinson, US consumer entertainment segment manager, ARM. "We expect increasing demand for an ASSP of this kind, and Oki's customers will ultimately benefit as they take advantage of the cost and ARM support benefits associated with the Oki ML675200 series of Digital Audio Controllers."

The ML675200 offers a wide variety of integrated peripherals, allowing designers to implement a complete MP3/WMA and speech processing system with a minimum of external devices. Among the useful features of the device are:

• DSP-based MP3 decoding engine A built-in speech CODEC
• A USB full-speed device controller (USB 2.0 compliant)
• 32 KB of SRAM
• 256 KB of flash ROM (available on flash ROM version)
• Operating temperature of -30 to +70° C
• A maximum operating frequency of 30 MHz for the CPU and 60 MHz for the DSP
• Serial UART ports
• GPIOs
• Timers
• Analog channels
• 4-channel DMA controller
•  A PLL circuit
• A built-in controller for external memory

Price and Availability

The ML675200 is currently sampling with mass production slated for Q3 2003. Production prices are expected to start at less than $10 for the ROM-less version in quantities of 100,000.

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.