SandForce Licenses Tensilica’s Diamond Standard 108Mini for Storage Controller Chipsets

SANTA CLARA, CA, – February 26, 2008 – Tensilica, Inc. today announced that SandForce, Inc., of Cupertino, Calif., has licensed the Diamond Standard 108Mini RISC controller core to use in their high-performance storage controller chipset designs.

“We needed a basic, low-cost, small controller, and the Diamond Standard 108Mini perfectly fit our requirements,” stated Alex Naqvi, CEO, SandForce.

“The Diamond Standard 108Mini lowers system cost due to its smaller size, higher performance, and better code density than competitive 32-bit controllers,” stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica’s vice president of marketing. “It’s the perfect solution for SandForce’s basic control needs.”

The Diamond Standard series of embedded processor cores covers the broadest range of performance of any embedded computing architecture. This makes it easy for design teams to pick the right price-power-performance tradeoffs for their particular application requirements. Developed for embedded applications, the Diamond Standard 108Mini is a small, cache-less RISC controller with tightly-coupled local instruction and data memories, a rich interrupt architecture, and high arithmetic and DSP performance.

About SandForce

SandForce, Inc., is a semiconductor company developing System on Chip products that boost the storage I/O performance of next generation servers, workstations and personal computers by orders of magnitude. Headquartered in Silicon Valley, SandForce is funded by the reputable venture capital firms Doll Capital Management and Storm Ventures. The company is led by a very strong management team with many years of experience in several successful startup companies in Silicon Valley.

About Tensilica

Tensilica offers the broadest line of controller, CPU and specialty DSP processors on the market today, in both an off-the-shelf format via the Diamond Standard Series cores and with full designer configurability with the Xtensa processor family. Tensilica’s low-power, benchmark proven processors have been designed into high-volume products at industry leaders in the digital consumer, networking and telecommunications markets. All Tensilica processor cores are complete with a matching software development tool environment, portfolio of system simulation models, and hardware implementation tool support. For more information on Tensilica's patented approach to the creation of application-specific building blocks for SOC design, visit www.tensilica.com.

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Editors’ Notes:

• Tensilica and Xtensa are registered trademarks belonging to Tensilica Inc. All other company and product names are trademarks and/or registered trademarks of their respective owners.
• Tensilica’s announced licensees include Afa Technologies, ALPS, Aquantia, Astute Networks, Atheros, AMD (ATI), Avision, Bay Microsystems, Berkeley Wireless Research Center, Broadcom, Brocade, Chiplen, Cisco Systems, CMC Microsystems, Conexant Systems, DS2, EE Solutions, Epson, ETRI, FUJIFILM Microdevices, Fujitsu Ltd., Hudson Soft, iBiquity Digital, Ikanos Communications, Intel, Juniper Networks, LG Electronics, Lucid Information Technology, Marvell, MediaPhy, NEC Laboratories America, NEC Corporation, NetEffect, Neterion, Nethra Imaging, Nippon Telephone and Telegraph (NTT), NuFront, NVIDIA, Olympus Optical Co. Ltd., Penstar, Plato Networks, PnpNetwork Technologies, Samsung, SandForce, Server Engines, SiBEAM, Silicon Optix, Sony, STMicroelectronics, Stretch, TranSwitch Corporation, u-Nav Microelectronics, UpZide, Valens Semiconductor, Validity Sensors, Victor Company of Japan (JVC), and XM Radio.