GDT joins Xilinx Alliance with H.264 EBH

Athens, Greece -- January 17, 2008 -- Global Digital Technologies S.A, today announced that it has joined the Xilinx Alliance Program with its H.264 EBH video encoder IP core, which conforms to ISO/IEC 14496-10 (ITU-T H.264 or MPEG-4 Part10 /AVC) standard. The Xilinx Alliance Program is designed for third-party companies to take a proactive role in optimizing their products for efficient design and development with Xilinx programmable solutions, enabling mutual customers to benefit from the added value of combined technologies.

GDT’s H.264 architecture allows flexible and highly competitive combination of encoding features in order to offer maximum video quality solutions tailored for different FPGA devices and system platforms.

At the same time, GDT entered the SignOnce IP Licensing Agreement. The SignOnce program is a Xilinx, Inc. initiated consortium where members have agreed to offer a set of common IP licensing terms to customers, reducing the time of IP licensing for customers as well as providers, and thus reducing significantly the time-to-market in an industry known for it’s lengthy agreement negotiations.

“Customer need for H.264 solutions is rapidly rising, particularly in applications like video surveillance and security” said Mark Bowlby, Senior Manager of the Alliance Program at Xilinx, Inc. “We are very excited to add Global Digital Technologies and their single-chip baseline encoder core to our catalog of outstanding third-party solutions.”

“Xilinx FPGAs are the industry's leading devices to offer multiple platforms that meet the requirements of different applications. When combined with GDT’s H.264 EBH core we are able to provide our mutual customers with highest quality video encoding solutions across a variety of end markets” said Kirsi Melvola, Director of Sales & Marketing in GDT. “We are delighted to qualify into the Xilinx® Alliance Program, as well as SignOnce IP License, and thus, are able to cater our customers with industries’ highest standards in the fastest possible way.”

About Global Digital Technologies S.A.

GDT is a system design company, established in 1994 in Preveza, Greece, focused on design in Silicon Intellectual Property cores for multimedia communications systems. Since 1999, the company has focused on IP cores and design services for multimedia, communications and embedded networked systems. In 2007 GDT’s digital communications systems design center was re-located at the microelectronics building of the Hellenic Technologies Cluster initiative (HTCI) in Athens, Greece. GDT is also a founding member of Hellenic SIA. GDT’s portfolio encompasses complete high technology cores for video compression, encoding and networking.