TSMC First Foundry to Offer Manufacturing of SuperH, Inc.'s SH-5 Core

Powerful SH5-103 Core Targets TSMC 0.13-micron Process

San Jose, California; Bristol, UK and Tokyo, Japan - 16 September 2002 - SuperH, Inc., a leading independent global IP provider that develops and licenses 32-bit and 64-bit RISC microprocessor cores for the open market, today announced that Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC) is the first dedicated semiconductor foundry to support the SuperH™ SH5-103 core. As part of a long-term goal to make SuperH cores available in TSMC's CMOS processes, the agreement gives TSMC a one-year exclusive right to the SH5-103 core as an open foundry. The SH5-103 core will be available in TSMC's advanced 0.13-micron process technology later this year.

''SuperH SH-5 customers can now begin designs for 64-bit applications supported by SuperH's front-end design kits and TSMC's industry leading processes,'' said Rick Chapman, vice president of marketing and sales for SuperH, Inc. ''This collaboration with TSMC provides a first-class foundry for our customers. We look forward to extending our range of product offerings with TSMC in the future.''

Kurt Wolf, director of IP and Library programs at TSMC, noted that, ''Our commitment is to support third party IP offerings that make the system-on-chip design process faster and easier. The digital convergence products that are the targets of the SuperH, SH-5 RISC core, ranging from set-top boxes to home gateways, will benefit from breadth of features available on the SH-5 core.''

The high performance SH-5 is a general purpose processor, capable of running many third party operating systems. It also has excellent signal and media processing capability. Along with the SH-5 core, SuperH, Inc. provides the SuperHyway™ on-chip interconnect solution that can be optimized for different cost/performance SH-5 implementations. A VSI compliant bus, the SuperHyway, supports a memory-mapped, packet-based split transaction protocol and in a typical implementation achieves an average bandwidth of 3.2GB/s when operating at 200MHz. The SoC design task is greatly simplified by allowing customers to easily interface any VSI compliant IP to the SuperHyway. SuperH, Inc. and its partners provide modeling tools that allow the designer to co-simulate the SoC prior to final integration.

SuperH, Inc. also provides the on-chip SHdebug module which facilitates advanced, non-intrusive debug of the SoC hardware and software. The SHdebug module communicates with development tools through either an industry standard JTAG port or higher speed SHdebug link. The two interfaces provide the same on-chip debug feature set including a logical connection between the tool and the SuperHyway which gives full access to the physical address map and all nodes connected to the SuperHyway. The JTAG interface can also be used for the normal boundary and internal scan functions.

TSMC offers the industry's largest catalog of third party intellectual property. Designers can easily combine the SH5-103 core with other TSMC-supported IP elements and their own IP, taking advantage of the SuperHyway interconnect and SHdebug module for development and debug of their final chip.

TSMC works extensively with industry-leading third-party IP providers to create the foundry industry's most comprehensive process-specific IP portfolio at technology nodes ranging from 0.25 micron to 90 nanometers.

These process-proven cores provide designers with increased assurance of right-the-first-time silicon while reducing overall engineering and out-of-pocket expenses. Without this service many design engineers would have to develop their own IP or purchase custom cores, all of which considerably delays time-to-volume.

TSMC's first 0.13-micron cores became available in August of 2000. Since then, the portfolio has been continuously updated by TSMC's third party partners. For more information, designers are encouraged to go to www.tsmconline.com

About the SH-5

The SH5-103 hard core implementation provides a high-performance core including the key peripherals for running operating systems

Features of the SH5-103 include:

At 400 MHz (worst case, automotive temperature), 1.2V, 0.13u:

• 604 DMIPS (Dhrystone 2.1)
• 9.6 GOPS
• 2.8 GFLOPS
• Connects to 3.2 GBytes/s pipelined, split transaction SuperHyway bus
• Power Consumption <400mW

Hardware Features:

• 64x64-bit Integer/Multimedia Register set
• 7 stage pipeline for sustained throughput
• IEEE754 Compliant Floating Point Unit
• Vector 3D Graphics Operations
• 64x32-bit FP Register set
• Efficient support for 32 and 64-bit applications
• Full SIMD capability for multimedia and packed arithmetic performance
• Virtual caches for high performance and low power
• 4-way set associative, 32 byte line
• 32 KB Instruction Cache, 32 KB Data Cache
• Extensive SW cache control including locking
• Memory protection and relocation through Memory Management Unit
• Fully associative TLBs (64 entry ITLB, DTLB)
• Variable page sizes (4K, 64K, 1M, 512M)
• 15 Interrupt levels plus one Non-maskable Interrupt
• Peripherals: real-time clock, interrupt controller, serial port, timer unit
• SuperHyway interface for building high performance SoC interconnect structures and supporting industry standard peripherals such as AMBA
• SHdebug run-time control and trace module

Future implementations of the SH-5 will include low power versions for battery powered devices.

About SuperH, Inc.,
SuperH, Inc., was established as an independent company in 2001 to develop processor cores for the open market. The high-performance, low-cost power efficient SH-5 core, is targeted at the next generation digital consumer, automotive and telecommunications applications. In the future, SuperH, Inc. will develop all subsequent SuperH cores to the open market, including the development of the SH-6 and SH-7 cores.

The SuperH family of high-performance 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-based processor cores is ideally suited for applications that require a highly integrated system-on-chip solution that includes a powerful embedded processing engine and can run a wide variety of application software on industry-standard operating systems and middleware. SuperH processors are used in many fields including digital consumer products such as set-top boxes, and digital cameras and games platforms; factory automation systems and car information systems. Further information about SuperH products can be found on www.superh.com.

About TSMC
TSMC is the world's largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, providing the industry's leading process technology and the foundry industry's largest portfolio of process-proven library, IP, design tools and reference flows. The company has one advanced 300mm wafer fab in production and one under construction, in addition to six eight-inch fabs and one six-inch wafer fabs. TSMC also has substantial capacity commitments at two joint ventures fabs (Vanguard and SSMC) and at its wholly-owned subsidiary, WaferTech. In early 2001, TSMC became the first IC manufacturer to announce a 90-nanometer technology alignment program with its customers. TSMC's corporate headquarters are in Hsin-Chu, Taiwan. For more information about TSMC please go to www.tsmc.com

SuperH™ is a registered trademark for products originally developed by Hitachi, Ltd. and is owned by Hitachi, Ltd

All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.