Faraday announces the launching of the world smallest programmable PLL-miniPLL

HSINCHU Taiwan and SUNNYVALE CA, December 22, 2004 -- Faraday Technology Corporation (TAIEX: 3035), a leading fabless ASIC and IP provider, today announced the launching of the world's smallest programmable PLL, miniPLL™.

The phase lock loop (PLL), utilized widely in Clock Synchronization and Phase Tracking circuits, has been proven as a very important design component in SoC technology today. Its applications include Frequency Synthesizer, Clock Generator, and Clock/Data Recovery Circuit (CDR).

As the process is scaled down to deep sub-micron, analog circuit such as PLL, by its nature, is unable to gain the same benefits such as smaller area, higher performance, and lower power consumption as digital circuits. To make matter worse, as the process scales down to deep submicron level, signal to noise (S/N) ratio also suffers degradation as the result of further voltage drop. Additionally, the non-linear spurious effect which was minuscule in the past becomes an important factor requiring special consideration. Faraday is proud to announce that, after a considerable investment in RD resources, we have made a breakthrough with the introduction of the miniPLL™.

The miniPLL™ is able to achieve industry's smallest size and programmability without sacrificing jitter and performance. Most importantly, dynamic and static powers are greatly reduced due to special circuit design. The miniPLL™ differs from the traditional PLL in that it does not consume any core area, which allows more dies per wafer and at same time, provides flexibility in chip floorplanning for backend designers. The following are the basic features of the miniPLL™:

Process: UMC 0.13µm / 0.18µm CMOS process Area: less than 2 IO slots (zero core area) (0.13µm) Operating voltage range: 1.08V ~ 1.32V (0.13µm), 1.62V~1.98V (0.18µm) Operating temperature: -40°C ~ 125°C Output clock frequency: Up to 1GHz (0.13µm) Locking time: < 50µs Cycle-to-cycle jitter: +/- 100ps

Availability

Both 0.18µm & 0.13µm mimiPLL™ will be available in Q1 2005.

About Faraday Technology Corporation
Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, PHY/Controllers for USB 2.0, Ethernet, and Serial ATA. With more than 500 employees and 2003 revenue of $111 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other markets, world-wide. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit: http://www.faraday-tech.com

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