Actel's eX FPGAs Selected By Eleven Engineering for Novel Wireless Ethernet Platform

Actel's Low-Power, Single-Chip eX FPGAs Provide Performance, Power and Security Benefits to Portable Consumer Electronics

MOUNTAIN VIEW, Calif., and EDMONTON, Alberta, July 28, 2004 - Actel Corporation (Nasdaq: ACTL) and Eleven Engineering, a leading developer of wireless processor ICs, today announced that Actel's low-power eX family of field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) are being used in Eleven Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet bridge platform. ETHx is a complete chipset and product design package for secure driver-free 802.3-compliant point-to-point wireless Ethernet cable replacement that is suitable for use in low-cost consumer and commercial products at 900 MHz, 2.4 GHz and 5.8 GHz. Actel's eX FPGAs serve as the high-speed I/O interface between Eleven Engineering's novel XInC wireless processor and an Ethernet PHY in the ETHx platform. With internal clock speeds in excess of 350 MHz and clock-to-out delays as fast as 3.9 ns, Actel's eX FPGAs provide the performance necessary to enable fast I/O throughput for Eleven Engineering's high-speed XInC wireless processor.

"When designing our ETHx wireless Ethernet platform, we needed a cost-effective device that could keep up with the performance levels of our XInC wireless processor yet also maintain low-power operation. While this combination is difficult to achieve, the antifuse architecture of Actel's eX FPGAs solves the performance and power problem inherent in portable applications," said John Sobota, CEO of Eleven Engineering. "As an added benefit, Actel's eX FPGAs provide excellent security features to fully protect our FPGA intellectual property from being copied or reverse engineered."

Dennis Kish, vice president of marketing at Actel, said, "Eleven Engineering's ETHx wireless Ethernet platform is a perfect example of the high-volume, portable, consumer applications for which our nonvolatile eX family is optimized. The eX devices achieve extremely low-power consumption while offering high performance and enhanced security. To further benefit portable applications, our eX FPGA family is offered in extremely small chip-scale packages and thin quad flat packs, allowing us to fit more logic in a much smaller area than alternative solutions, which in turn permits our customers to offer increased portability and miniaturization in their products."

Eleven Engineering's XInC wireless processor is a multithreaded-hardware 16-bit pipelined RISC processor with eight independent hardware threads, each behaving as a separate processor with unrestricted access to main memory and the peripheral bus. XInC's architecture results in outstanding MIPS per gate efficiency and slashed time-to-market. When coupled with an Actel eX FPGA, high-speed I/O throughput between the XInC processor and other devices in the ETHx platform can be achieved.

About the eX Family of Devices

Offering a low-power sleep mode for extra battery power savings, the eX family of devices is optimized for portable applications. Additionally, the single-chip solutions are competitively priced compared with the cost of complex programmable logic devices (CPLDs), low-density gate array ASICs or two-chip FPGA alternatives. The eX family has been designed into cable and xDSL modems, digital photography applications, MP3 Internet recorders/players, personal digital assistants and digital set-top boxes. The combination of eX with simple-to-use Actel software tools results in faster design turns and time to market.

About Eleven Engineering

Eleven Engineering Incorporated is a supplier of innovative wireless processors and platforms. Unlike conventional microprocessors, Eleven's XInC wireless processors are built from the ground up specifically for use in wireless products, making it much more efficient than conventional serial processors in size, cost, power consumption and time-to-market. Eleven also licenses the XInC core to other chip makers for incorporation into their products. Eleven combines XInC with software written by Eleven's software R&D group, and with radio frequency transceiver chips from partner firms into bundles called Platforms. Eleven's Platforms make it fast and easy for customers to incorporate short-haul wireless capability into their products -- in other words to "Make it Wireless." Eleven has a large patent portfolio in the wireless and processor spaces. Eleven was incorporated in 1992 and is headquartered at 10150 - 100 St., Suite 900, Edmonton, Canada, T5J 0P6. Internet: http://www.ElevenEngineering.com.

About Actel

Actel Corporation is a supplier of innovative programmable logic solutions, including field-programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) based on antifuse and flash technologies, high-performance intellectual property (IP) cores, software development tools and design services, targeted for the high-speed communications, application-specific integrated circuit (ASIC) replacement and radiation-tolerant markets. Founded in 1985, Actel employs more than 500 people worldwide. The Company is traded on the Nasdaq National Market under the symbol ACTL and is headquartered at 2061 Stierlin Court, Mountain View, CA, 94043-4655. Telephone: 888-99-ACTEL (992-2835). Internet: http://www.actel.com.

Editor's Note: The Actel name and logo are registered trademarks of Actel Corporation. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

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