Faraday Expands Commitment to ARM with V5TEJ and 926EJS Licenses

Complete line of highly-differentiated ARM CPUs by leading ASIC vendor ensures proliferation of ARM processors in new communication, industrial and multimedia applications

Hsinchu, Taiwan, and Sunnyvale, California – February 1, 2007 --  Faraday Technology Corporation (TAIEX: 3035), a leading fabless ASIC and IP provider, today announced that Faraday has licensed the ARM926EJ-S™ microprocessor and the ARMv5TEJ instruction set for its next-generation FA CPU family for embedded, networking and multimedia applications. The popular ARM926EJ-S processor and the ARMv5TEJ instruction set have become the most requested technology for Faraday's international products. Faraday expects its products based on the ARM926EJ-S processor for 0.13um HS and 90nm at its primary foundry, UMC, to be available in Q2 and Q3 2007 respectively. Faraday's own proprietary implementation of the ARMv5TEJ instruction set, the FA626TE CPU cores, will also be available in Q3 2007.

ARM and Faraday entered into a license agreement in 2002, originally focused on the ARMv4 instruction set, with Faraday developing its proprietary implementations for specialized markets. The commitment to invest the resource to develop custom CPUs based on the ARMv5TEJ instruction set is one which only a few tier-one companies have made before. Over the years, Faraday has invested more than 100 man years and further benefited from this license, with more than 50 ASICs under development or in production. In addition, its products in video surveillance, keyboard-video-mouse (KVM), and network security have taken advantage of proprietary features of the ARMv4 architecture-based CPUs. Now as the market has clearly moved to the ARMv5TEJ instruction set, Faraday is expanding its commitment to include both the ARM926EJ-S processor as well as its own proprietary implementations.

“In recent years, we have seen a significant increase in demand for ARM Powered® designs, as ARM has emerged as the architecture of choice in the embedded world. Most importantly, ARM provides us with the flexibility we need to deliver customized solutions to meet unique customer requirements,” said H.P. Lin, President at Faraday Technology. “With this agreement, we will continue to develop our CPU solutions and fulfill the market needs.”

The ARMv5TEJ instruction set has several advantages which benefit customers: the Thumb® instruction set helps reduce code size, especially when embedded ROM/flash is used; DSP instructions for media, motor, and other signal processing functions; and Jazelle® Java acceleration instructions help Java applications for hand-set and network equipments. For Faraday, the ARM926EJ-S processor and the FA626TE product will have different positioning. The former will be used to leverage the most complete ecosystem in the SoC world, including operating systems (OS), tools, and application middleware, while the latter will be used for very specific needs such as video codec and 1GHz CPUs.

“The use of the ARM926EJ-S processor with the ARMv5TEJ instruction set ensures that Faraday is able to offer a larger and more complete range of ARM technology than any other ASIC vendor,” said Dr. George Hwang, Vice President of R&D and International Business at Faraday. “We are committed to deliver the best price/performance products based on the ARM926EJ-S processor in our target foundry processes, and our FA626TE and FA606T products will also be compelling and differentiated.”

Availability

Faraday expects its versions of the ARM926EJ-S processor for 0.13um HS and 90nm at its primary foundry, UMC, to be available in Q2 and Q3 respectively. Faraday's own proprietary implementation of processors with ARMv5TEJ instruction set, the FA626TE core, will also be available in Q3 2007. Other ARMv5TEJ instruction set-based CPUs will be available in 2008 and 2009.

About Faraday Technology Corporation

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad silicon IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, MPEG4, H.264, PHYs/Controllers for USB 2.0, 10/100 Ethernet, Serial ATA, PCI Express, Cell Library and Memory Compiler. With more than 700 employees and 2006 revenue of US$171 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other world-wide markets. Headquartered in Taiwan, Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S., Japan, Europe, and China. For more information, please visit: www.faraday-tech.com.