Rambus Licenses Its Serial Link Technology to STMicroelectronics for Fibre Channel and PCI Express Applications

-- Rambus Inc. (Nasdaq:RMBS), one of the world's premier technology licensing companies specializing in high-speed chip interfaces, today announced that STMicroelectronics (NYSE:STM) has signed an agreement to license Rambus's RaSer(TM) Fibre Channel and PCI Express(TM) serial link technologies to be incorporated into the ST 90nm process technology library.

"As more chip connections move to serial interfaces, our customers need access to quality serial link solutions on the right process technology in order to get their products to market quickly," said Flavio Benetti, ASIC business unit director for ST's Wireline Infrastructure Division. "Rambus offers not only world-class, silicon-proven technology, but also system level design insight and signal integrity expertise to help tackle complex system environments. As a result, partnering with Rambus allows ST to invest more on differentiating our core products."

The Rambus family of RaSer cells offers designers scalable serial link architectures that are optimized to address current and future serial link applications requiring the highest bandwidth and channel count on a single chip. The RaSer serial link family includes a variety of backplane serial interfaces, Gigabit and 10-Gigabit Ethernet PHYs, XAUI and double-XAUI serial interfaces, PCI Express(TM) and Turbo PCI Express PHYs, 1, 2 & 4 Gbps Fibre Channel and SONET/SDH 2.5Gbps PHYs, and 5-12.5 Gbps high-speed serial interfaces. These solutions currently support all major foundry processes ranging from 180nm to 65nm.

"ST is able to provide its ASIC customers with ready access to proven serial link solutions by integrating our serial link technology into their advanced process technology library," said Kevin Donnelly, Vice President of Engineering at Rambus. "This growing trend of outsourcing serial link technology dramatically reduces an ASIC supplier's development costs and provides its customers fast access to silicon-proven solutions for all the latest interface standards. The benefit to ST's customers includes faster time to production, resulting in an ability to increase market share with their next generation products."

The Rambus RaSer serial link technology is offered as a library cell for ASIC and ASSP designs. A complete serial link solution, each RaSer cell contains serializer, transmitter, receiver, deserializer, clock multiplier and clock recovery circuitry. These cells are designed to meet the physical layer requirements for a wide range of serial link applications, each of which may have different logical requirements (protocol, framing, coding, etc.). As a replacement to discrete serial link components, the RaSer family may be integrated with other communications functions in order to offer better integration and reduced component cost.

About Rambus Inc.

Rambus is one of the world's premier technology licensing companies specializing in the invention and design of high-speed chip interfaces. Since its founding in 1990, the company's innovations, breakthrough technologies and integration expertise have helped industry-leading chip and system companies solve their most challenging and complex I/O problems and bring their products to market. Rambus's interface solutions can be found in numerous computing, consumer, and communications products and applications. Rambus is headquartered in Los Altos, Calif., with regional offices in Chapel Hill, North Carolina, Taipei, Taiwan and Tokyo, Japan. Additional information is available at www.rambus.com.