BOPS Announces Industry's First SOC in a Box

Mountain View, Calif., January 15, 2001 - BOPS, Inc., the leading provider of programmable broadband DSP cores, today announced the industry's first SOC (System On Chip) in a Box with its carrier-class VoIP (Voice over Internet Protocol) solution. BOPS' VoIP SOC in a BoxTM, which was developed in conjunction with partners Tality Inc, HelloSoft and supported by TSMC, is the first in a family of licensable SOCs in a Box designed to drastically reduce time-to-market and technical risk for telecom equipment vendors and chip companies.

BOPS' VoIP SOC in a Box is a full pre-packaged application solution that includes complete sample hardware and software design along with implementation services for a carrier-class Voice over IP (VoIP) gateway. The SOC design is offered by BOPS in collaboration with HelloSoft who provide the system software for Carrier-class gateway (CGW) applications supporting all VoIP standards. Customer specific implementations of this design -- including system design, peripheral design and SOC implementation services -- are available through Tality.

BOPS' VoiceRayTM CGW uses a set of eight cores to deliver up to 192 channels of G.729a or 512 channels of G.711, both with 32ms of G.165/168 echo cancellation on a single chip. VoIP features supported include G.723.1/726/ 728/729a vocoders; G.165/168 16, 32, 64, 128 ms echo cancellation; VAD, CNG, DTMF; and signal classification, running on SIP or H.323 protocols.

In addition to the carrier class VoIP solution, modular SOC configurations and compatible VoIP parts are supported by BOPS and its partners for small-medium business (SMB) applications with up to 96 channels of G.729a on a chip and small-office, home-office (SOHO) applications with up to 24 channels of G.729a on a chip.

"The VoIP SOC in a Box is the first of many complete SOC solutions you will see from BOPS in the coming year," said Carl Schlachte, CEO of BOPS. "The inherent scalability and reusability of our DSP intellectual property combined with our SOC design methodology allows us to quickly generate new SOC solutions for VoIP market and others. Essentially, we are offering telecom equipment vendors and chip companies the ability to create more high-performance products in a shorter time while also having the flexibility to choose who will manufacture their ASICs. We're giving our customers more control over their destinies."

"We forecast the market for third-party semiconductor intellectual property to grow at an average of 46 percent per year over the next four years," said Jim Tully, Chief Analyst at Gartner/Dataquest. "Those areas with the greatest scope for growth will center around highly differentiated application-specific IP. In particular, we believe that products based on a DSP or processor core and embedded in an application-specific software wrapper will offer very exciting growth possibilities. Semiconductor vendors and system OEMs value applications knowledge highly, and this approach is a great way to provide it."

BOPS' SOC in a Box includes:

• RTL for the SOC design
• SOC evaluation and design platform
• All DSP software
• All system software
• SOC implementation services
• Foundry services
• Other third-party alliances

Information on BOPS' VoIP SOC in a Box can be found at http://www.bops.com/sb1. The company is offering a series of half-day seminars scheduled for the Bay Area, Dallas, Boston, and Europe.

An evaluation kit available for $35,000 includes:

• Jordan Evaluation Board: The Jordan EVB is a PCI card which contains up to a 266 MB per second PCI bus, a 1 GB per second memory interface to 64Mbytes of SDRAM and a 400 MB per second interface to a QED RM5231TM MIPS® RISC controller.
• System Design Kit (SDK): BOPS SDK integrates the compiler, assembler, linker, loader, debugger and simulator tools into a seamless environment for DSP application development, and allows customers to convert C, C++ and MATLAB® files quickly and efficiently into BOPS ManArrayTM assembly code for their DSP applications.
• Evaluation software package from BOPS/HelloSoft

About BOPS Based in Mountain View, Calif., BOPS, Inc. develops and licenses a fully scalable, synthesizable DSP architecture that is programmable and reusable for evolving communications, mobile multimedia and wireless applications. BOPS' DSP architecture, cores, compilers, system tools and complete SOC designs offer total life-cycle solutions and rapid time-to-market. While providing the highest performance in the industry, BOPS cores are DSP co-processors to ARM, MIPS and other hosts and are supported by an extensive alliance of hardware, software, tools and design partners. For more information, please visit http://www.bops.com.

Note to editors: BOPS is a registered trademark of BOPS, Inc. SOC in a Box, ManArray and VoiceRay are trademarks of BOPS, Inc. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders.

QUOTES:

Krishna Yarlagadda, chairman of HelloSoft and founder of ZSP, said "HelloSoft has created VoIP software for the leading hardware platforms out there today, including the current density champion from Silicon Spice. We have found the BOPS solution not only easy to program but also having very high channel density and the best cost per port. The efficiency of this architecture and its ease of scalability ranks this solution as the best in the industry. The BOPS solution will enable very low channel costs and power savings which are critical factors for the industry."

Bob Wiederhold, CEO of Tality, the recently spun-out design services unit of Cadence, said: "This complete package from BOPS is the first of its kind and they are taking the IP game to the next level. By providing the entire SOC solution, hardware, software, tools and support, they drastically reduce customers risk and enhance their time-to-market. The past two chips we built for BOPS took less than 3 ½ months in physical design. We expect this solution will offer even greater productivity."

Rick Tsai, executive vice president, marketing, TSMC, said: "BOPS provides high-performance DSP IP which is the final critical piece that gives OEMs the freedom to make their DSP choice separately from their silicon choice thereby giving them an opportunity for best-in-class of both -- and at the same time freeing them from the high cost of ASICs. Our experience with BOPS has shown that they really know how to squeeze the highest performance out of our silicon."

Brad Wurtz, former vice president and general manager of the Carrier Packet Voice business unit of Cisco Systems, and a member of BOPS' advisory board, said, "This announcement from BOPS is particularly significant since it is the 'best in class' solution available, and it can be sourced from a new supply chain that can include or bypass traditional silicon vendors. This kind of innovation in technology and in supply chain re-ordering is very healthy for our industry."

Contact info:

Ashok Setty
HelloSoft
408-569 6500
ashok@hellosoft.com

Jim Douglas,
Tality
408-944-7955
jimd@tality.com

Chuck Byers
TSMC
408-451-2208
cbyers@tsmc.com