Rambus and NEC Electronics Sign Agreement for High-Speed Backplane Serial Link Interface Technology

-- Rambus Inc. (Nasdaq:RMBS), a leading developer of chip interface products and services, and NEC Electronics Corporation (TOKYO:6723), a leader in application-specific integrated circuits, today announced that NEC Electronics has licensed the RaSer(TM) X backplane serial link interface for high-performance ASIC applications.

The Rambus RaSer X interface solution is designed to tackle the toughest interconnect problems associated with backplane environments in high-speed enterprise switches and routers, storage area network switches and blade servers. The addition of RaSer X to NEC Electronics' own lineup of serial interface solutions will allow customers an even greater selection of high performance, low risk solutions. The first serial link cell licensed to NEC Electronics will operate at 6.25 Gbps.

"Our customers need the flexibility to tackle a variety of protocols, applications and frequency ranges," said Tetsuo Yoshino, vice president of the 1st Systems Operations Unit at NEC Electronics Corporation. "Rambus's serial link technology complements our existing offerings by bringing added value to our customers with flexible solutions that enable faster time-to-market. We look forward to exploring future opportunities with Rambus."

"As system capacity requirements continue to increase, enterprise users need to extend the lifecycle of existing equipment investments," said Kevin Donnelly, vice president of the Logic Interface Division at Rambus. "Our proven RaSer X technology and the extensive internal expertise of NEC Electronics will help bring compelling solutions to the market that offer new levels of flexibility and scalability as well as the ability to bring these solutions to the market quickly and within budget."

Rambus's RaSer X serial link technology enables up to four times the bandwidth of existing solutions and incorporates proven signaling technology to enable high performance over various backplane materials, connectors and trace lengths. The RaSer X solution incorporates a multi-tap transmitter and receiver equalizer, low-jitter transmitter, high-sensitivity receiver and calibrated on-chip termination resistors, as well as the Auto-Adapt(TM) feature that continuously adjusts multiple coefficients of both the transmit Feed Forward Equalizer (FFE) and the receive Decision Feedback Equalizer (DFE) to compensate for humidity and temperature variances.

The Rambus RaSer serial link interface family includes 0.18-micron, 0.13-micron, 90 nanometer and 65 nanometer versions on multiple foundry processes. In addition, Rambus offers its customers engineering services for chip integration, package, board and system characterization and test in order to ensure success in the development of high-speed backplanes. Additional information about the various Rambus RaSer serial link solutions can be found at www.rambus.com/raser.

About Rambus Inc.

Rambus is one of the world's leading providers of advanced chip interface products and services. 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.

About NEC Electronics

NEC Electronics Corporation (TOKYO:6723) specializes in semiconductor products encompassing advanced technology solutions for the high-end computing and broadband networking markets, system solutions for the mobile handsets, PC peripherals, automotive and digital consumer markets, and platform solutions for a wide range of customer applications. NEC Electronics Corporation has 26 subsidiaries worldwide including NEC Electronics America, Inc. and NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH. Additional information about NEC Electronics worldwide can be found at www.necel.com.