TriMedia Technologies, Inc. Announces Appointment of Jim Thomas To Vice President, VLSI Design

TriMedia Technologies, Inc. Announces Appointment of Jim Thomas To Vice President, VLSI Design

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--August 1, 2000--

A 20 Year Industry Veteran, Thomas Takes On the New Role of Transforming the Successful TriMedia Processor Core Into a Licensed IP Product Targeted At Burgeoning Consumer Electronics Applications

TriMedia Technologies, Inc., today announced the appointment of Jim Thomas as vice president, VLSI Design. He is a 20-year industry veteran with extensive experience in DSP, controller, and RISC processor design and applications. Prior to joining TriMedia Technologies, Inc., Thomas was a vice president of Motorola Semiconductor Products Sector. In that position, he led a number of different microprocessor groups, the last one, the MCore Technology Center. Thomas' role is to continue building the TriMedia Technologies design engineering team to create the highly successful TriMedia processor core as a licensed IP product supported by TriMedia Technologies' software and world-class compiler technology. A significant aspect of his engineering efforts is directed at assuring IP customers that the licensed TriMedia IP core and peripherals are easy to integrate. With the increasing convergence in the multimedia processing space and demands on design flexibility, OEMs can not afford to build their own proprietary processors. By licensing a fully supported standard architecture, they can concentrate their engineers on their core competencies. Cees Hartgring, president and CEO, TriMedia Technologies, said, "We're very pleased to have Jim Thomas on our team because he brings considerable microprocessor engineering, design, and applications breadth and depth that we need to make further progress with the licensing of our TriMedia intellectual property." About joining TriMedia Technologies, Thomas said, "The advances I've seen in the industry are phenomenal. Yet, there remains considerable potential for other key VLSI design advances, particularly in the consumer electronics space. That's where TriMedia will play a major role as the industry standard architecture in sophisticated applications like advanced set-top boxes and high-definition TV. I'm very pleased to be at TriMedia Technologies, which is a unique processor IP company that'll forge new technology frontiers in consumer electronics."

Proven VLIW Cores

The TriMedia 32-bit embedded processor cores have served as the computational heart for a series of media processor products. Originally designed in 0.35 micron technology in 1996, the TriMedia CPU is now available as a hard core in TSMC (Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation), 0.18 micron technology. These cores are designed for easy, seamless integration into system-on-a-chip (SOC) products and support a standard real-time operating system (RTOS). The TriMedia VLIW (very long instruction word) architecture is ideally suited for performance-hungry media processing tasks, such as encoding/decoding MPEG video streams, encoding/decoding multi-channel audio streams, or demultiplexing/multiplexing broadcast transport streams, for example. The architecture processes up to five operations in every clock cycle, yet eliminates the costly control logic typical of superscalar processors. The instruction set architecture is optimized for media processing with special data-parallel operations and a rich set of integer and floating point operations. TriMedia Technologies is currently developing its next generation core. The new core will boost CPU performance and include additional features such as a memory management unit (MMU), enabling the processor to support a broader range of operating systems. The second generation TriMedia core will be available in 2001.

About TriMedia Technologies

TriMedia Technologies, Inc., a new Silicon Valley-based company, develops and licenses VLIW (very-long instruction word) processor technology used in a broad range of consumer digital video and networking appliances. TriMedia technology is already used in digital television receivers, advanced set-top boxes, video editing systems, digital video recorders, video phones, and home networking products. The company was established with the initial backing of two leaders in consumer electronics, Royal Philips Electronics and Sony. The company anticipates investments from additional leading consumer electronics and semiconductor companies. Please visit the company's website: www.trimediatechnologies.com.