Sunplus Selects SonicsLX(TM) for Portable Media Player SoC

-- Sonics Inc., a premier supplier of system-on-chip (SoC) SMART Interconnect solutions, today announced that Sunplus Technology Company Ltd., the world's leading fabless IC company, has selected the SonicsLX SMART Interconnect solution to develop its new portable media player SoC.

"Sunplus is looking for the best configurable interconnection solution which can save time and money with lowering risks," said Henry Lee, Vice President, Technology R&D Center, Sunplus. "SonicsLX with its high bandwidth capability and low power consumption has allowed Sunplus to develop the competitive portable media player SoC for quick time-to-market."

"We are delighted that our SonicsLX solution has been adopted by Sunplus to help develop the next generation portable media player SoC," said Phil Casini, vice president marketing and business development, Sonics Inc. "We believe Sunplus will take the advantage of SonicsLX to realize a significant competitive advantage with their new portable media player SoC design. SonicsLX will also deliver compounding benefits as they continue to adopt the solution across more products over time."

SonicsLX contains a full set of data flow services that accommodate the advanced requirements of lower complexity, or value SoCs. The arbitration scheme available in SonicsLX provides a Quality of Service (QoS) proven to support high-definition video. SonicsLX also supports memory management from multiple cores capable of achieving high efficiency access to external DRAM and has a data flow topology that can be tuned specifically for the mix of low latency and high bandwidth required by the application. Semico Research named this category value SoCs in comparison to the high performance, highly integrated, or performance SoCs, built using the more feature rich SonicsMX SMART Interconnect solution. SonicsLX was selected by EDN magazine as a hot 100 product for 2006.

About Sonics

Sonics Inc. is a premier supplier of SMART Interconnect solutions that deliver high SoC design predictability and increased design efficiency. Major semiconductor and systems companies including Broadcom, Samsung, Texas Instruments and Toshiba have applied Sonics' SMART Interconnect solutions in leading products in the wireless, digital multimedia and communications markets. Sonics is a privately-held company funded by Cadence Design Systems, Toshiba Corporation, Samsung Ventures and venture capital firms Investar Capital, Smart Technology Ventures, TL Ventures, Easton Hunt Capital, JAFCO Ventures, and H&Q Asia-Pacific. For more information, see www.sonicsinc.com

About Sunplus Group

Sunplus Group, headed by Sunplus Technology Company Limited established in 1990, is devoted in IC design for electrical consumer applications. Sunplus offers not only IC design but also system solutions to maximize customer's benefits by differentiating each design. Sunplus' reusable IPs such as audio/video, microprocessor and digital signal processor technologies are applied to numerous IC solutions for multimedia home applications and ASICs that contributed to our quality life. Due to the expansion of business scope, Sunplus split its BUs into several fabless IC design companies in 2006. The LCD IC business was spun-off into Orise Technology Co., Ltd.; the Controller &Peripheral BU was transferred into Sunplus Innovation Technology Inc.; the Personal Entertainment BU and Advanced BU were spun-off into Sunplus mMobile Inc. The parent company - Sunplus Technology, keeps working on Home Entertainment IC solutions such as VCD/DVD, DVR DVB and LCD TV. For more information, please visit the Sunplus website: www.sunplus.com.