Altera and Elektrobit Offer First OBSAI RP3-01 Development Kits for Wireless Base Station Designs

San Jose, Calif. and Oulunsalo, Finland, August 15,2006—Altera Corporation (NASDAQ: ALTR) and Elektrobit Group Plc. (HEX:EBG1V) today announced the availability of the industry‘s first development kits for designing applications in compliance with the Open Base Station Architecture Initiative (OBSAI) Reference Point 3-01 (RP3-01) specification for remote RF heads. The kits include a Stratix® II GX FPGA development board and Nios® II embedded processor core from Altera, Elektrobit‘s advanced RP3-01 IP cores, as well as all the necessary design software for emulating system configuration and control behavior. Leveraging the kits for OBSAI-compliant wireless base station development will result in cost saving and significantly reduced design time.

”Altera and Elektrobit joined forces to provide a clear time-to-market advantage for OEMs designing remote radio heads for WiMAX, 3GPP and 3GPP2 systems,“ said Arun Iyengar, senior director of Altera‘s communications business unit. ”Established wireless infrastructure and radio module developers as well as new market entrants can now apply the latest OBSAI specification to their products.“

The Stratix II GX devices included with each kit fuse the industry's fastest and highest-density FPGA architecture with up to 20 full-duplex, high-performance, low-power, multi-gigabit transceivers. The Nios II family of embedded processors currently consists of three processor cores that implement a common instruction set architecture, each optimized for a specific price/performance point, and all supported by the same software tool chain.

The RP3-01 specification describes data and control requirements between the basestation (BTS) baseband and remote radio heads. It also includes all the operational, administrative, maintenance and performance (OAM&P) related design elements.

Elektrobit is a partner in Altera‘s ecosystem serving systems OEMs in the wireless industry. Committed to providing maximum value, Altera and its partners offer reference designs and IP for digital radio such as crest factor reduction, digital predistortion, digital down conversion and digital up conversion. Altera also offers baseband solutions for WCDMA, HSDPA, HSUPA and WiMAX.

Development Kits Price and Availability

Two OBSAI RP3-01 development kits will be available in Q3 2006. The RNS RP301 EVA BB1 base band kit provides USB data through the RP3-01 protocol using optical fiber and costs 15.000€. The RNS RP301 EVA RF1 RF kit allows clock recovery measurements and costs 20.000€. For more information go to: www.altera.com/m-elk-obsai.pdf.

About OBSAI

OBSAI is an open basestation initiative aimed at specifying and certifying interfaces between various functions within the basestation. The RP3 plane details the relevant control interfaces between a remote RF unit and the BTS. Visit www.obsai.org for more details.

About Elektrobit

Elektrobit specializes in wireless technology — the design and lifecycle testing of electronics products ¾ as well as in production automation. Elektrobit Group is a versatile engineering company, which, in addition to its design services, develops, sells and markets its own technologies and products to customers. The company‘s customers include the telecommunications, automotive, defense and space, industrial automation, and well being and medical industries. Elektrobit employs some 1,800 wireless technology experts in 15 countries. More information is available at www.elektrobit.com.

About Altera

Altera‘s programmable solutions enable system and semiconductor companies to rapidly and cost-effectively innovate, differentiate and win in their markets. Find out more at www.altera.com.