Faraday Unveils Highest Performance NPU with Structured ASIC Programmability for Less Than $50

-- Faraday Technology Corporation (TAIEX: 3035), a leading fabless ASIC and IP provider, today announced the NetComposer-II (NC-II), a high-end structured ASIC programmable NPU solution at the Fall Processor Forum. With more ASIC logic, higher processing speed, and higher throughput interfaces, the NC-II will be available in production quantity in Q3 2005 to address the next wave of intelligent switches for data center and metro Ethernet.

"I am very excited about the development of NC-II," said Dr. George Hwang, Vice President of R&D and Marketing at Faraday Technology. "It takes Faraday into the heart of the network communications ASIC business. The NC-II is the compelling differentiation we need to expand into this new market."

As Ethernet becomes the pervasive protocol to deliver networked data, there is a greater and greater need to apply intelligence to traffic flow (content networking and security) and translation between legacy interfaces and Ethernet (multi-service). In both cases, there is a growing need to take Gigabit and 10 Gigabit Ethernet traffic, and perform deep packet inspection (Layer 4 – 7) before forwarding the data. Faraday's NC-II solution fulfills these requirements.

Product Overview

The NC-II is the high-end version of the NC-I, previously announced in September, 2004. Like the NC-I, it is a combination of a full-featured NPU Platform Chip with the programmability of structured ASIC technology. It delivers 0.13um ASIC technology at a fraction of the time-to-market and NRE cost. The NC-II carries forward such NC-I features as Faraday's proprietary FA626 ARM CPU, a programmable DMA engine, a programmable crossbar switch, PCI-X, and DDR SDRAM interfaces. In addition, NC-II integrates several new features to handle 1 Gbps of intelligent traffic flow:

CPU Complex:

The NC-II raises the speed of the FA626 to 600 MHz, and connects the CPU complex to a 64-bit DDR400 SDRAM interface. In addition, the L-2 cache is increased from the NC-I's 32KB to 128KB.

Structured ASIC:

There are 3 million ASIC gates and 1.5 million bits of SRAM for designers to incorporate proprietary algorithms into NC-II, thus greatly accelerating the packet processing. It is commonly acknowledged that custom ASIC logic can accomplish the same task some 50 times to 1000 times faster than a general purpose microprocessor can, with similar power consumption saving benefit.

Programmable SerDes:

The NC-II breakthrough comes from its use of metal programmable SerDes. The SerDes can be programmed to support PCI-Express, GigE, SATA (1.5G and 3G), Serial RapidIO, Fiber Channel, HyperTransport, and XAUI. In fact, the NC-II incorporates a total of eight SerDes lanes to enable connections between these interfaces. Designers can either use Faraday's controller and link layer logic, or create their own proprietary protocol layers and embed them into the structured ASIC to optimize traffic flow.

"The NetComposer family combines the silicon-proven assurance of an application specific standard product with the proprietary advantages of a custom ASIC," said C.J. Liang, Associate Vice President of R&D at Faraday. "We see this as the way of the future, and we intend to develop even more solutions just like NC-II."

Pricing and Availability
Faraday's NetComposer-II will be available for production in 2005 Q3. It will be fabricated using UMC 0.13um HS process and fits in a 484 PBGA packaging. The NRE for developing an NC-II based platform chip is $300,000, and the unit price is $ 50 in 1,000 piece quantities.

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