IPextreme Levels the Playing Field with Constellations Program

Crowdsourcing Approach Connects Sales Teams of Independent IP Companies into a Single Global Community

Silicon Valley, Calif. – March 17, 2009 – IPextreme, Inc., the company bringing famous IP (intellectual property) to system-on-chip designers worldwide, today announced another business model innovation for the semiconductor IP industry, its Constellations™ program. Constellations provides the business level infrastructure for enabling an open community of independent semiconductor IP companies to collaborate at the sales level by sharing sales intelligence and market wisdom to provide a virtual world-wide sales footprint.

Constellations is aimed at solving a problem that has long troubled the semiconductor IP community—small companies with good technology lack the global sales footprint to compete against larger competitors and are therefore at a structural disadvantage that results in an oligarchic industry structure that rewards the large players at the expense of the small ones.

Members of the program can submit known opportunities for IP they don’t carry to the Constellations database where they are routed to the sales team of the relevant member companies. When a sale is registered by a member company, a royalty is paid back into the program and shared with the submitting member company.

Initial members of Constellations include:

CAST, Inc. New Jersey, USA	"We have a broad range of solid IP products - and proven expertise in everything from processors to interfaces to multimedia and encryption - but sometimes our customers need additional IP or services," said Hal Barbour, president of CAST, Inc. "We're excited to offer customers even more complete solutions through the innovative Constellations program."
NXP Semiconductors Eindhoven, The Netherlands	"The Constellations program will create unique opportunities in the semiconductor industry and we are pleased to be a part of this initiative", said Bart De Loore, Vice President and Corporate IP & Architecture Manager, NXP Semiconductors. "NXP has valuable IP, such as the CoolFlux DSP & BSP cores, that we can now offer to the industry as part of this program".
Sidense Ontario, Canada	“Over the past year, we have seen a significant increase of interest in our low-cost, field-programmable, secure and reliable embedded one-time programmable IP for a wide variety of on-chip data and code storage, key encryption, and analog trimming/sensor calibration applications,” stated Xerxes Wania, Sidense President and CEO. “IPextreme’s Constellations Program gives us a great opportunity to reach a large number of embedded memory users and to engage these potential customers at a very reasonable cost.”
Tiempo Grenoble, France	"Tiempo asynchronous and delay-insensitive design technology represents the next breakthrough for ultra-low power, green semiconductor devices," said Serge Maginot, CEO of Tiempo S.A.S, "Constellations is an innovative way to provide global visibility for our microcontroller and crypto-processor IP products that are designed in this disruptive technology."

“IPextreme was founded around the principle of expanding the IP market by enabling semiconductor companies to monetize their high value IP assets,” said Warren Savage, president and CEO of IPextreme. “We see Constellations’ crowdsourcing[1] approach as an additional way that we can bring value to the semiconductor market by enabling independent IP companies to have the value of their products made visible to more customers at minimum expense.”

Constellations Membership and Pricing

A one-year membership in the Constellations program is $5,000. For more information and details of the program, visit http://www.ip-extreme.com/partners/constellations.html

About IPextreme Inc.

IPextreme packages, delivers and supports famous IP (intellectual property) designed by large semiconductor companies and used by system-on-chip (SoC) designers worldwide. These production-proven IP products serve both broad horizontal markets and specific verticals such as consumer and automotive, and are provided in a process-independent and EDA-neutral format for easy use by the broadest range of customers. With a decade of experience in developing, packaging, licensing and supporting IP, IPextreme offers a complete business solution that allows semiconductor companies to strategically leverage their internal IP portfolio and expand overall revenue. The company has offices in Campbell, California; Munich, Germany; and Tokyo, Japan with representatives in China, India, Israel, Korea and Taiwan. For additional information, please visit www.ip-extreme.com.

About CAST, Inc.

CAST provides a broad range of popular IP cores and system IP for ASICs and FPGAs. Privately owned and operating since 1993, CAST has a reputation for high-quality IP products and industry-leading technical support. The company is headquartered near New York City, partners with IP developers around the world, and works with select sales consultants and distributors throughout Europe and Asia. Learn more at www.cast-inc.com, or call +1(201)391-8300.

About NXP Semiconductors

NXP is a leading semiconductor company founded by Philips more than 50 years ago. Headquartered in Europe, the company has about 30,000 employees working in more than 30 countries and posted sales of USD 5.4 billion (including the Mobile & Personal business) in 2008. NXP creates semiconductors, system solutions and software that deliver better sensory experiences in TVs, set-top boxes, identification applications, mobile phones, cars and a wide range of other electronic devices. News from NXP is located at www.nxp.com.

About Sidense

Sidense Corp., the only logic non-volatile memory provider listed on EE Times 60 Emerging Startups list for 2009, provides secure, dense and reliable non-volatile, one-time programmable (OTP) memory IP for use in standard-logic CMOS processes, with no additional masks or process steps required. Sidense's patented one-transistor 1T-Fuse™ architecture (U.S. Patent #7402855 and others) provides the industry’s smallest footprint and lowest power Logic Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) solution.

Sidense OTP memory is available at 180nm, 130nm, 110nm, 90nm, 65nm, and 55nm and is scalable to 40nm and below. The IP is available at UMC, TSMC, SMIC, Tower, Fujitsu Microelectronics, IBM and Chartered. Customers are using Sidense OTP for analog trimming, code storage, encryption keys such as HDCP, RFID and Chip ID, medical, automotive, and configurable processors and logic. For more information, visit www.sidense.com.

About Tiempo

Tiempo develops and markets core IPs designed in a disruptive technology that is fully asynchronous and delay insensitive, allowing to build chips that are ultra-low power (energy consumption, current peaks), robust against PVT variations, operating at ultra-low voltage and secured against hardware attacks. Tiempo IP portfolio includes soft and hard cores of asynchronous microcontrollers, microprocessors and crypto-processors for standard ciphering algorithms (DES/3DES, AES, RSA, ECC), and is supported by an automated synthesis tool fully interfaced with standard EDA flows and using standard hardware description languages. Targeted applications are chips for embedded and/or secured electronics, such as sensors, metering devices, RFID, smartcards, NFC devices, automotive and mobile consumer products. For more information, please visit www.tiempo-ic.com.

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[1] Jeff Howe, writing in Wired magazine, defined crowdsourcing as "the act of a company or institution taking a function once performed by employees and outsourcing it to an undefined (and generally large) network of people in the form of an open call."