CEVA Announces Launch Of Lowest-Power SGMII IP For Gigabit Ethernet Interfaces In Enterprise And Carrier Data Communications Systems

CEVA Expands Serial Communications Portfolio With Xpert-Connect SGMII, The Industry's Lowest Possible Pin And Power Serial GMII interface

SAN JOSE, Calif. - June 23, 2004 - CEVA, Inc. (NASDAQ: CEVA; LSE: CVA), the leading licensor of Digital Signal Processing (DSP) cores and communications solutions to the semiconductor industry, today announced that it has expanded its Serial Communications Intellectual Property (IP) portfolio with the release of Xpert-Connect SGMII.

The Serial Gigabit Media Independent Interface (SGMII) from Cisco Systems provides a low power and robust solution for connecting external Gigabit Ethernet PHY chips to the corresponding MAC layers embedded in a separate SoC. Today, the vast majority of Gigabit Ethernet-enabled chips shipped use the parallel GMII interface standard to link the MAC and PHY components. With the rapidly increasing adoption of Gigabit Ethernet, next-generation chip designs need to integrate multiple Gigabit Ethernet ports. Serial GMII provides the optimal solution for replacing the existing parallel GMII, significantly reducing the pin and power budget for the MAC-PHY interface.

SGMII is poised to be the dominant MAC-PHY interface in the next wave of Gigabit Ethernet-enabled silicon in enterprise and carrier network equipment, SOHO equipment, PCs, laptops and high-end multimedia processing devices.

Using CEVA's Xpert-Connect SGMII IP, the Serial GMII interface can be implemented with the lowest possible pin and power budget. Building on the advanced, ultra-low power Xpert-Connect serialiser/deserialiser (serdes) technology, CEVA provides a physical layer interface with an embedded clock, which both removes the need for a separate clock line to time the data transfer and removes the power associated with driving the separate clock. Furthermore, this embedded clock approach eliminates clock to data timing skew issues, resulting in a highly robust interface.

"The exceptionally low power of our Xpert-Connect serdes technology enables new levels of integration to be achieved in many applications traditionally employing parallel busses for connectivity," said John Ryan, Vice President of Communications at CEVA. "Through our advanced physical layer technology and fully compliant SGMII link protocol layer, CEVA provides a comprehensive solution to customers looking to implement SGMII."

About Xpert-Connect

Xpert-Connect is a growing family of connectivity IP based on advanced, low power, physical layer technology. In addition to SGMII, Xpert-Connect technology has been developed into IP solutions for FibreChannel and Serial ATA. For more information, visit www.ceva-dsp.com/sgmii

About CEVA, Inc.

For more information about CEVA, Inc, visit the about section of our website.