Aplus Flash Technology signs OTPdesign licensing agreements with many companies worldwide

- Aplus Flash Technology, a leader in nonvolatile memory, recently recently signed licensing agreements with 7 customers for its 0.5um OTP at Episil Technologies, and 3 customers for its 0.35um OTP at SMIC, all of whom will be running on Aplus organized shuttles at their respective foundries. Some of the top IC design houses in Taiwan, China and the US are among these customers (names will not be disclosed at this time for confidentiality purposes). These companies design ICs for a wide range of applications including but not limited to speech recognition, speech synthesizer and playback, consumer ICs, wireless applications, GPS, LAN, USB, modems, etc.

Aplus' embedded OTP IP is running on shuttles on Episil's 0.5um 2P2M OTP process and SMIC's 0.35um 2P3M OTP process. Episil Technologies is a 6" foundry located in Hsinchu, Taiwan, offering technologies down to 0.3um. SMIC is one of the largest foundries in Shanghai, China, offering technologies 0.35um and below on 8" wafers. Through Aplus' strategic partnerships with its partner foundries, Aplus is able to provide its customers with the highest level of design, layout and testing support, while also offering competitive wafer pricing for companies using Aplus' OTP IP.

In addition, many of the companies are using Aplus' design for more than one product. For example, Aplus is designing all the embedded memory in one customer's consumer microcontroller, which uses both OTP and SRAM. Aplus' unique contribution is its SRAM, which is 100% memory compatible to the OTP, and is not generated from compilers for more efficient die sizes and performance.

"We chose Aplus because of its established, silicon-proven record in OTP design in 0.5um technology. Because our products are made for the consumer market, it's important that they be competitive in die size, low in power consumption, yet still very quick in speed. Aplus has been able to show us that they have the ability to achieve our product requirements," states a recently signed 0.5um OTP customer.

Aplus is currently running a 0.5um OTP shuttle at Episil Technologies and will be running a 0.35um OTP shuttle at SMIC in September. Aplus' OTP IP has also been verified at Hynix and UMC. In addition to these foundries, Aplus also works with other foundries on technologies such as 0.25um ROM, 0.18um and 0.13um embedded flash.

About Aplus Flash Technology:
Aplus Flash Technology, Inc., was founded in 1998 as a fabless design company. Our founders, Peter W. Lee et al. are pioneers and leaders in nonvolatile memory (NVM) technology specializing in embedded NVM memory IP. Our product line includes memory products like ROM, OTP EPROM, NTP and EEPROM, with Flash under way. It also encompasses embedded designs such as ROM, OTP, NTP, EEPROM and MaxFlash embedded. Aplus' embedded licensees include leading global semiconductor companies and our foundry connections span worldwide in countries including Taiwan, Korea and China. For more information, please visit: www.aplusflash.com.