Kaben Synthesizer Clock IP Successfully Deployed at Atsana.

Ottawa, ON – January 15, 2003 – Kaben Research Inc., a leading developer of mixed-signal, Intellectual Property (IP) blocks for Wireless, System-on-a-Chip (SoC) manufacturers, announced today that its programmable clock generator IP has been successfully deployed into Atsana Semiconductor's J2210 SoC.

In order to be competitive in the current economic climate, fabless semiconductor manufacturers are being forced to increase the value propositions of their product offering. The natural evolution is to integrate higher levels of functionality onto a single chip, thereby creating an SoC. This higher level of integration meets the demand for lower cost, lower power consumption, and smaller form factors. However, many companies lack the vertical design depth in all of the areas that are required for building a successful SoC. They may be strong RF companies that need help in the digital domain, or signal processing companies that lack expertise in the design of RF or mixed-signal circuits.

One solution is to license cells from third party IP vendors such as Kaben Research. Key to the IP licensing model is that chip vendors can become SoC manufacturers without having leading-edge expertise in every discipline. They can evaluate their core value propositions and internal expertise; focus on executing their strategies, while turning to third-party IP vendors in areas where they do not currently have a competitive edge. Kaben's focus is to deliver mixed-signal IP cells to companies whose strengths lie in areas other than precision timing or high performance frequency synthesis.

The Atsana J2210 is an SoC, combining Atsana's patent-pending Array Processor with an embedded ARM9 RISC processor and a clock multiplier DLL using Kaben's architectures. Targeted to wireless device OEMs, the J2210 complements baseband processors, thus enabling multimedia applications on devices such as cell phones, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and wireless PC cameras.

"Tapping into Kaben's expert knowledge in frequency synthesizers enabled us to reduce the design risks, lower our costs, and shorten our development time; our relationship with Kaben meant that we were free from having to build up our in-house capability just to create a single cell." said Richard Beriault, Atsana's Director of Hardware Engineering. "Having access to Kaben's world-class synthesizer design expertise gave us a great feeling of comfort."

Describing the benefits of Kaben's mixed-signal IP blocks to SoC manufacturers, Kaben VP Sales and Marketing, Seste Dell'Aera said, "Our customers can complement their internal design expertise by integrating Kaben's proven synthesizer cells which means that they can focus on developing IP built from their core capabilities." Referring to the benefits to the system designer, Dell'Aera added, "SoC designers can rapidly integrate Kaben's synthesizer IP according to the specific demands of each product. We help reduce the overall complexity and guess work for the designer by delivering IP blocks that have been previously tested and characterized, thereby minimizing the risk and shortening the time required to bring an extremely complex product to market."

About Atsana
Atsana Semiconductor Corp. is a leader in the development of fully programmable, low-power consumption multimedia processors for wireless devices such as handsets, personal digital assistants (PDAs), and PC and network cameras. The semiconductor company's array processing technology enables the creation of multimedia wireless devices that consume two to three times less power than solutions offered today. In addition, Atsana's processor enables better quality video encoding, supports higher resolution, and is easily scalable and programmable to support a myriad of multimedia applications and standards. Atsana is headquartered in Ottawa, Canada. For more information, visit www.atsana.com.

About Kaben
Kaben Research is an IP company focused on design, development, and licensing of mixed-signal building blocks that are key to creating future SoC products. The company delivers high-performance, proven IP blocks to SoC manufacturers in the wireless communications market that significantly reduce risk, cost, and time to market. For more information, please visit our Web site at www.kabenresearch.com.