K-micro Licenses CEVA Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) PHY for Enterprise Storage Applications

SAN JOSE, Calif., Nov. 15 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- K-micro and CEVA Inc., (Nasdaq: CEVA - News; LSE: CVA - News), the leading licensor of digital signal processors (DSP) cores, multimedia and storage platforms to the semiconductor industry, announced today that K-micro has licensed CEVA's 3.0Gbps Serial attached SCSI PHY technology. Licensing CEVA's SAS technology will enable K-micro to extend its revolutionary Topaz subsystem to include enterprise storage applications, and provide K-micro's customers with technology to address the growing SAS market with their ASICs.

K-micro's Topaz subsystems are essentially a system-on-a-chip, containing processors, encryption engines, internal busses, and a wide variety of interfaces. To create an SoC for their application, customers merely need to add their proprietary logic to the computing subsystem, greatly simplifying their engineering efforts and speeding up their products' time-to-market. K-micro's vision is to continue to create new versions of Topaz for different applications.

With one of the lowest power consumption profiles of any SAS PHY solution available on the market, combined with an aggressively small die area, CEVA's Serial Attached SCSI 3.0Gbps PHY offers a highly efficient solution that can be used in either Initiator or Target mode. For multi-port applications, it can be simply replicated to create solutions with four, eight or more channels. When combined with CEVA's own protocol layers, leveraging CEVA's SAS IP is a very cost effective way to develop a fully-compliant, silicon-proven SAS solution for ASIC designs.

K-micro's licensing of CEVA's 3.0Gbps Serial Attached SCSI PHY demonstrates the ongoing success of the collaboration between the two companies. In 2004, K-micro licensed and qualified CEVA's 1.5Gbps SATA for its 130nm ASIC intellectual property (IP) portfolio and brought it to full production. In 2005 K-micro added CEVA's 90nm 3Gbps SATA PHY and protocol layers to their IP portfolio. Most recently, K-micro licensed the CEVA-VoP(TM) Voice-Over-Packet platform for integration into its ASIC offerings.

"CEVA's SAS 3.0Gbps PHY is a welcome addition to our IP portfolio and will enable our storage customers to develop advanced technology solutions in this rapidly growing market. Excellent support during the development and integration of the IP into our ASIC portfolio has enabled K-micro to rapidly deploy this IP," said Joel Silverman, vice-president of Technology Solutions at K-micro. "When it came to choosing a partner for SAS, CEVA was the natural choice. We believe K-micro's Topaz with a 3.0Gbps SAS interface will be well- received by our customers."

"We are pleased to extend the relationship between K-micro and CEVA to include our Serial Attached SCSI technology," said John Ryan, VP and general manager of the Communications Business Unit, CEVA Inc. "We believe K-micro's Topaz subsystem enables faster time-to-market and lower costs for the development of complex SoCs and the addition of CEVA's SAS IP to their portfolio offers their ASIC customers another key technology with which to differentiate their product."

About CEVA, Inc.

Headquartered in San Jose, Calif., CEVA is the leading licensor of digital signal processor (DSP) cores, multimedia and storage platforms to the semiconductor industry. CEVA licenses a family of programmable DSP cores, associated SoC system platforms and a portfolio of application platforms including multimedia, audio, Voice over Packet (VoP), Serial Attached SCSI (SAS) and Serial ATA (SATA). In 2005, CEVA's IP was shipped in over 130 million devices. For more information visit ceva-dsp.com.

About K-micro (Kawasaki Microelectronics)

K-micro's innovative ASIC technologies and world-class design support are used in the consumer electronics, computer, office-automation, networking and storage markets. The company is an active participant in industry standards organizations, including InterNational Committee for Information Technology Standards (INCITS) Technical Committee T10 for SCSI Storage Interfaces, Optical Internetworking Forum (OIF), PCI Special Interest Group (PCI-SIG), USB Implementers Forum, Digital Living Network Alliance (DLNA), Universal Plug and Play Forum (UPnP), the Digital Display Working Group (DDWG), Home Phoneline Networking Alliance (HomePNA), Multimedia over Coax Alliance (MoCA), and OCP International Partnership (OCP-IP). K-micro has design centers in Boston, San Jose, Taipei, and Tokyo. For more information, contact the company at 408-570-0555, or visit http://www.k-micro.us/ .

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Source: Kawasaki Microelectronics; CEVA Inc.