Tensilica appoints Spike Technologies
as Authorized Design Center

Santa Clara, Calif., July 23, 2001 … Tensilica Inc., the leading supplier of configurable processor core intellectual property (IP) for System-on-Chip (SOC) designs, today announced that Spike Technologies has been appointed a Tensilica Authorized Design Center and has joined theTensilica Xtensions Network..

As an Authorized Design Center, Spike’s engineering personnel will receive extensive training on the Xtensa architecture, configuration and software development tools, on-going support and access to technology updates.

“Spike Technologies has established an excellent reputation for providing quality design services to their customers for complex SOC designs,” said Bernie Rosenthal, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing and business development. “Their expertise in supporting Tensilica’s IP will enable our customers to achieve their demanding time-to-market, performance, and cost objectives. We look forward to a beneficial association”.

Design centers like Spike provide essential services to many organizations that use leading edge SOC designs in their products. Spike will have access to Tensilica’s IP to help these organizations complete their SOC designs.

“The high performance and time-to-market requirements of our customers demand effective solutions that need significant levels of IP and integration expertise,” stated Pradeep Vajram, COO of Spike Technologies, Inc. “This association with Tensilica brings together a unique configurable processor technology and an experienced design team to help customers with their SOC designs.”

About Spike Technologies

Spike Technologies, Inc., (www.spiketech.com) was founded in 1994 and has established itself as a leading Chip Design company specializing in ASIC, FPGA, Custom Layout & Circuit Design, and EDA Tools development. Spike is a Preferred Design Partner for some of the top technology companies in the world and has the ability and experience in providing quality solutions for all phases of VLSI design.

Headquartered in Milpitas, CA with a state-of-the-art Design Center in Bangalore, India, Spike’s expertise ranges from accomplishing fast and accurate implementation of a single VLSI design to the composite task of building multi-million gate system-on-chip (SoC) designs. Spike has delivered expert design skill, dedicated professional project management, and the quality and integrity expected from a truly world-class organization.

About Tensilica

Tensilica was founded in July 1997 to address the fast-growing market for configurable processors and software development tools for high volume, embedded systems. Using the company's proprietary Xtensa Processor Generator, system-on-chip (SOC) designers can develop a processor subsystem hardware design and a complete software development tool environment tailored to their specific requirements in hours.

Tensilica's solutions provide a proven, easy-to-use, methodology that enables designers to achieve optimum application performance in minimum design time. The Company is engaged in research, development, and customer support from its offices in Santa Clara, California; Burlington, Massachusetts; Princeton, NJ; Houston, Texas; Oxford, U.K.; Stockholm, Sweden; Taipei, Taiwan, R.O.C.; and Yokohama, Japan.

Tensilica is headquartered in Santa Clara, California (95054) at 3255-6 Scott Boulevard, and can be reached at (408) 986-8000 or via www.tensilica.com on the World Wide Web.

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Editors' Notes:

"Tensilica" is a registered trademark and "Xtensa" is a trademark belonging to Tensilica Inc. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are property of their respective owners.

Tensilica’s announced licensees are, in alphabetical order, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Fujitsu Limited, Galileo Technology, Hughes Network Systems, Ikanos Communications, JNI Corporation, Mindspeed Technologies, National Semiconductor, NEC Networks, NEC Solutions, NTT, ONEX Communications, TranSwitch Corporation and ZiLOG.

Visit Tensilica at Embedded Systems Conference 2001, September 4-7, Hynes Convention Center, Boston, Mass., booth number 115.