Amphion builds european sales operations to serve wireless system-on-chip semiconductor market

Belfast, Northern Ireland (June 15, 2001) - Amphion Semiconductor Ltd. (formerly Integrated Silicon Systems) today announces the major expansion of its sales and marketing activities in the European market for semiconductor Intellectual Property (SIP). Amphion is the leading provider of application-specific IP Cores and system-level Platform IP for wireless and broadband communications System-on-a-Chip design.

"The aggressive development of Amphion's business in Europe turbo-charges our expansionist business growth strategy and follows the successful establishment of Amphion's direct sales and support operations for Japan, Western Area USA, and East Coast US and Canada." said J G Doherty, Amphion's CEO and co-founder. "Amphion enjoys technology leadership in extreme-performance cores and platforms for wireless and broadband. We have the products that Europe-based semiconductor and systems designers really need to integrate cost-effective SoC designs and maintain leadership in wireless and telecoms markets."

According to Jim Tully, Chief Semiconductor IP Analyst at Gartner Dataquest, Europe continues to be the fastest-growing market for semiconductor IP compared to the US, Japan, and Asia-Pacific: European growth was 78% in year 2000. From a revenue standpoint, Dataquest reports that more IP is now being acquired for communications systems applications than consumer electronics projects. Continued over?

Amphion's European Sales Operations
Andrew Barber joins the company in the newly created role of European Sales Director and heads the company's pan-European sales and customer support operations centered at newly opened company offices in Milton Keynes, England. In addition, Amphion has formally signed MTC® Micro Tech Consulting GmbH as the company's Munich-based sales agency for Germany, Austria and Switzerland. Amphion is already represented in France by Paris-based MISIL Technologies, and in Israel by Wizard Electronic Services.

European Sales Director
As Amphion's European Sales Director, Andrew Barber is now responsible for business development and strategic customer relationships across Europe for the company's ASVC standard products and platform IP solutions for wireless and broadband applications. Mr. Barber brings to Amphion over fourteen years of sales management experience in System-on-a-Chip semiconductor design services and electronic systems design industries. He joins Amphion from Tality Corporation (the design services subsidiary of Cadence Design Systems, Inc. [NYSE: CDN]) where he managed semiconductor business development in Northern Europe, specialising in markets for wireless and multimedia communications, data and telecommunications, and information appliances. Prior to Tality, he worked in sales and marketing positions at VLSI Technology (now Philips Semiconductors) and Plessey Research & Technology. Speaking from Amphion's US co-headquarters, Joe O'Neill, VP Worldwide Sales & Marketing said "Andrew's semiconductor sales experience and understanding of the mobile communications industry in Europe makes him a valuable asset to Amphion's worldwide sales organization. His team is creating solid foundations for greater business growth in Europe."

European Sales Office
Amphion's new European Sales operations are located at offices in Milton Keynes, England:

Amphion Semiconductor Limited
CBXII, West Wing, 382-390 Midsummer Boulevard
Central Milton Keynes, England, UK, MK9 2RG
Tel: +44 (0) 1908 847109
Fax: +44 (0) 1908 847580
E-mail: info@amphion.com
URL: http://www.Amphion.com

New IP Core products
Amphion (formerly ISS) provides a range of low-power, area-efficient, high-performance IP core solutions for video, image, speech and signal processing applications implemented in SoC, ASIC or FPGA technologies. New products introduced this year include the CS6550 High-Definition MPEG-2 Decoder multimedia core for set-top box and digital video applications, and the CS3500 Turbocode communications cores for 3GPP and CDMA2000 systems.

About Amphion
Amphion is the leading supplier of application-specific virtual components (ASVCs) and system-level IP core solutions (Platform IP) for IP-based System-on-a-Chip (SoC) integrated circuit designs for wireless and broadband communications applications. Amphion delivers video/image compression, speech/voice coding, and channel coding solutions for consumer and communications applications. Amphion offers a range of products designed to be the cornerstones of advanced convergence products. Using proprietary techniques for direct-mapped implementations of digital signal processing functions and algorithms in hardware, Amphion develops and licenses IP cores that realize 10X to 1000X improvements in performance compared to conventional implementations using software-programmable DSP processors. Amphion is a privately-held company with corporate headquarters in Belfast, Northern Ireland, UK and worldwide sales and marketing headquarters in San Jose, California. Amphion was formally known as Integrated Silicon Systems Ltd, or ISS. For more information, visit the Amphion website at http://www.Amphion.com

Notes to Editors:
Amphion, The Amphion logo, "Virtual Components for the Converging World", "Innovation by Amphion", "The Multimedia ASVC Company", are trademarks of Amphion Semiconductor Ltd. All other brand names or product names are trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.