TSMC and BOPS Team to Produce Highest-Performance, Programmable, Single-Chip DSP Chip in Industry

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., June 13, 2000, --Billions of Operations Per Second, Inc. (BOPS), a leading programmable DSP core provider, and Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (TSMC) announced today that TSMC was chosen as the foundry to build BOPS? Manta^TM DSP chip and is a member of BOPS? Alliance Partnership program. In addition, BOPS is a now a member of TSMC?s industry leading Design Service Alliance.

The Manta DSP chip integrates the BOPS2040XL DSP core with PCI, SDRAM and MIPS^® SysA/D bus I/O. At 150MHz, the Manta chip provides industry-leading 24 bops and 1.3 GFLOP performance in a single DSP chip. Cadence Design Services (NYSE: CDN) implemented the BOPS DSP and I/O intellectual property, which was then manufactured by TSMC in the standard 0.25um enhanced process.

?Our agreement with BOPS is another example of two industry leaders working together to meet an exploding demand for increasingly complex intellectual property. By becoming a member of TSMC?s Design Service Alliance, BOPS becomes part of a coordinated design value-chain that is of direct benefit to our mutual customers,? said Peyman Kazemkhani, director, IP Alliance, TSMC.

Carl Schlachte, BOPS CEO and chairman, added, ?Our goal is to help our customers develop the highest-performance programmable DSP applications with the best partners. TSMC has proven itself to be an excellent foundry partner for our Manta chip.?

TSMC?s Design Service Alliance (DSA) partners provide industry-leading, silicon-verified libraries, intellectual property and design services directly to designers in fabless semiconductor companies, IDMs and systems houses. DSA partners provide best-of-class, silicon-verified libraries; high-performance, leading-edge intellectual property cores; unprecedented accuracy in design simulation, validation and verification; faster cycle time from specification through tapeout to finished wafers; and access to experienced designers and developers of complex functions.

About BOPS, Inc.
Billions of Operations Per Second, Inc. (BOPS) is a Mountain View, Calif.-based company that develops and licenses the highest-performance programmable DSP core family, the ManArray? family, as well as development tools for high-volume, SOC solutions for the Internet, multimedia and wireless communications markets. The BOPS ManArray DSP product family is targeted to accelerate SOC manufacturers? time from product concept to high-volume shipments by providing the highest-performance, scaleable and reusable DSP cores and an advanced set of software tool technologies.

About Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation
TSMC is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, providing the industry?s leading process technology, library and IP options and other leading-edge foundry services. With the mergers of WSMC and TASMC (effective June 30, 2000), TSMC is constructing or operating 11 fabs and has substantial capacity commitments at three additional facilities jointly operated by TSMC and its partners. In 2000, TSMC expects to have the capacity for nearly 3.4 million 8-inch equivalent wafers. Fabrication processes offered by TSMC include CMOS logic, mixed-mode, volatile and non-volatile memory, and BiCMOS. TSMC?s corporate headquarters are in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan. More information about TSMC is available through the World Wide Web at http://www.tsmc.com.
 
 

For Information Contact:

TSMC
Dan Holden, PR Manager, 408-451-2282

BOPS
Renee Anderson, Corp. Communications, 650 330-8410
Georgia Marszalek, BOPS PR Counsel, 650 345-7477

Notes to editors:
A/D: Analog/Digital
bops: Billions of Operations per Second
FPGA: Field Programmable Gate Array
GFLOPS: Giga Floating Point Operations per Second
DSP: Digital Signal Processor
I/O: Input/Output
IP: Intellectual Property
PCI: Peripheral Component Interface
SDRAM: Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory
SOC: Systems-on-Chip