Cypress Licenses Tensilica’s Xtensa Processor as Product Development Platform for USB and Wireless Products

Xtensa Expected to Improve Cypress’s Design Cycle Time

SANTA CLARA and SAN JOSE, Calif., October 14, 2002 – Tensilica, Inc., and Cypress Semiconductor Corp. (NYSE: CY) today announced that Cypress plans to use Tensilica’s Xtensa processor as the base product development platform for several future USB and wireless products. Cypress is recognized as the world leader in USB and believes Tensilica has the best total solution for its product roadmap.

“After an extensive competitive evaluation, we decided to partner with Tensilica because of its robust development tool chain and ability to scale the Xtensa processor depending on the application,” said Cathal Phelan, vice president, Personal Communications Division, Cypress. “We’ve been looking for a processor that is easy to configure; we intend to add custom instructions for maximum performance. Tensilica automatically generates a tool chain that matches each exact configuration, which will help us speed up our development cycles.”

“Cypress became a leader in the USB and wireless chip markets by getting innovative new chips to market much faster than other suppliers, and we’re delighted to help them reach new milestones by moving critical tasks to customized Xtensa processors,” stated Bernie Rosenthal, senior vice president of marketing and sales for Tensilica.

About Xtensa

The Xtensa configurable and extensible microprocessor architecture provides a powerful, integrated hardware and software development environment with thousands of configuration options and an unlimited range of customer-specific extensions. The environment enables designers to carefully tune the processor for their particular application. With an easy-to-use graphical interface, designers can take advantage of Tensilica’s processor generator to create customized MPU solutions with specialized functional and instructions. Because these instructions are recognized as “native” by a complete set of software development tools, developers can simultaneously tune both application software and processor hardware to meet specific speed, power and feature goals.

About Cypress

Cypress Semiconductor Corporation (NYSE: CY) is Connecting from Last Mile to First Mile with high-performance solutions for personal, network access, enterprise, metro switch, and core communications-system applications. Cypress Connects using wireless, wireline, digital, and optical transmission standards, including Bluetooth, USB, Fibre Channel, SONET/SDH, Gigabit Ethernet, and DWDM. Leveraging its process and system-level expertise, Cypress makes industry-leading physical layer devices, framers, and network search engines, along with a broad portfolio of high-bandwidth memories, timing technology solutions, and programmable microcontrollers. More information about Cypress is accessible online at www.cypress.com.

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; Austin, Texas; Raleigh, NC; 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.

# # #

Editors’ Notes:

“Tensilica” and “Xtensa” are registered trademarks belonging to Tensilica Inc. CoreConnect is a trademark of IBM. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.

Tensilica’s announced licensees are Avision, Bay Microsystems, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, Broadcom, Cisco Systems, Conexant Systems, Cypress Semiconductor, ETRI, FUJIFILM Microdevices, Fujitsu Ltd., Hughes Network Systems, IC4IC, Ikanos Communications, JNI Corporation, Marvell (Galileo Technology), Mindspeed Technologies, National Semiconductor, NEC Networks, NEC Solutions, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., ONEX Communications, Olympus Optical, OptiX Networks, Osaka & Kyoto Universities, TranSwitch Corporation, Trebia Networks, Victor Company of Japan (JVC) and ZiLOG.