Frontier Silicon Selects Elliptic as Security Supplier

September 18, 2008 - Ottawa, Canada: Frontier Silicon has selected Elliptic Semiconductor as their security supplier of their next-generation products.

Frontier Silicon is a global supplier of advanced Connected Audio and DAB (Digital Audio Broadcast) DAB+ and DMB-A (Digital Media Broadcast -Audio) programmable baseband receivers, enabling Digital Audio broadcast and Internet radios.

The next-generation Frontier product will offer enhanced security capability for multi-scheme digital rights management (DRM) including support for Microsoft Certified for Windows Vista® DRM (formerly known as PlaysForSure).

"The market for digital audio applications is demanding a much broader security solution to allow distribution of high value content under multiple DRM schemes", said Mark Hopgood, Marketing Director of Frontier Silicon. "The team at Elliptic fully understands these requirements and offered IP of exceptional quality, which integrated smoothly into our design flow".

Also commenting on the announcement, Richard White, CEO of Elliptic said: "This licensing deal with Frontier Silicon takes Elliptic into a new domain of digital audio applications. The Frontier team's guidance and integration of our technology with theirs was excellent. We look forward to future engagements through subsequent generations of Chorus products."

Frontier's Chorus based family of Digital Radio and Connected Audio receiver solutions provides radio manufactures with an extremely flexible baseband receiver covering a number of physical layer standards, particularly those utilizing COFDM modulation. The baseband signal processing is achieved using a blend of hardware and software to optimize trade-offs between power, cost and flexibility. DAB, DAB+ and DMB receivers are used throughput Europe and Asia and offer high quality audio and highly efficient use of the radio spectrum. With the addition of Internet Radio processing, Chorus forms an integral part of Frontier's unified connected audio receiver strategy. Digital rights management solutions will permit broadcasters to offer premium content and open up a business case for subscription services not previously supported by early digital radio receivers.

About Frontier Silicon

Frontier Silicon is the World's leading supplier of integrated circuits and modules for digital audio receiver products and mobile digital TV. Established in 2001 as a privately funded fabless semiconductor company, Frontier Silicon has over 140 employees. The company is based in Watford, England, with design centers in Cambridge, Dublin and Shannon. Frontier Silicon also has branch offices and technical support representation in Hong Kong, China and Japan. Products include complete solutions for digital audio systems and mobile TV, from silicon through software to production-ready platform designs.

Customers include Alba, Bang & Olufsen, Bose, Bush, Denon, Cyrus, Goodmans, Grundig, harman/kardon, Hitachi, JVC, Magic Box, Ministry of Sound, Onkyo, Panasonic, Pioneer, Philips, Pure, Revo, Roberts, Samsung, Sanyo, Sharp, Sony, TEAC and Yamaha.

About Elliptic

Ranked as the fastest growing provider of security semiconductor IP by Gartner, Elliptic licenses semiconductor intellectual property (IP) cores and middleware for secure communications ranging from low power to multi-gigabit per second implementations. Elliptic SIP cores enable system-on-chip designers to efficiently balance power, performance and silicon area in complex security-based systems. Elliptic is certified under the ISO-9001:2000 quality standard and the NIST Cryptographic Algorithm Validation Program (CAVP). Demanding customers in markets such as wireless, storage, content distribution, implantable medical devices and high performance communications trust Elliptic IP cores. The company was founded in 2001 and has customers in the United States, Israel, China, Taiwan, Korea, Malaysia, Europe and Canada.