SiberCore Technologies and UMC Announce Fabrication of World's Highest Density Ternary CAM

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Ottawa, Canada and Hsinchu City, Taiwan - June 11, 2001 – SiberCore Technologies, the leader in providing silicon-based packet management products and solutions to the Internet infrastructure market, and United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC), a world-leading semiconductor foundry, today announced the successful fabrication and delivery of the world's highest density Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) integrated circuit. SiberCore's latest and most advanced product, the SiberCAM™ Ultra-9M, was fabricated using UMC's 0.15-micron technology and has demonstrated excellent initial yields. The Ultra-9M utilizes the foundry industry's smallest SRAM cells (3.15um2), enabling over 9.4 million ternary storage elements to be integrated with significant amounts of network processing logic elements in a single chip.

In addition to achieving the industry's highest density, the SiberCAM Ultra-9M also delivers advanced, patent-pending features including a three-port architecture and dynamically variable word-width support for 36-, 72-, 144- and 288-bit wide words. The Ultra-9M provides the highest packet look-up speeds on the market, supporting up to 100 million searches per second (MSPS) for 36-, 72- and 144-bit wide searches and 50 MSPS for 288-bit searches, independent of table update activity. These features and performance make the Ultra-9M the industry's most advanced and highest density ternary CAM available today. A detailed product announcement of the Ultra-9M will be forthcoming early in the summer of 2001.

"It is through our close working relationship with a leading foundry partner like UMC that we are able to realize these ambitious performance and feature targets," said Dr. Ken Schultz, SiberCore's President and CEO.

SiberCore will avail itself of process geometry and manufacturing enhancements as they emerge, allowing for developments such as an Ultra-18M, which is slated for introduction in 2002. "Over the next 12 to 18 months, we will be migrating our product developments to 0.13 micron and smaller geometries. UMC's expertise and support in the field of high-density, small-geometry wafer processing is instrumental in our continued product evolution, making our design objectives much more attainable," concluded Schultz.

"UMC recognizes the importance of applying the latest process technologies to emerging classes of internetworking equipment," said Dr. Jim Ballingall, Vice President of Worldwide Marketing at UMC. "The relationship between UMC and SiberCore, whose networking co-processor technology addresses a fundamental bottleneck in high performance routers and switches, represents an exciting and vital contribution towards faster packet transmission on the Internet."

Commenting on the successful fabrication of such a high density and complex device, Greg Stanley, SiberCore's Vice President of Operations, said, "UMC was a natural choice for us because of its excellent reputation for leading edge process developments, quality and customer service. Throughout our working relationship we have been impressed with their process technology, their customer interface and their commitment to excellence in providing the specialized services required by our complex products. We have a long-standing relationship with UMC, and I am sure that the partnership will lead to more exciting developments in the future. While others are talking about having products of this density in the future, SiberCore has real product tday."

The successful development and fabrication of the Ultra-9M reconfirms SiberCore's design leadership in the field of multi-megabit CAM development, an area the founders of SiberCore pioneered while at Nortel Networks. Future products in the SiberCAM family will continue to push the technology envelope in terms of density and features, maintaining the company's track record of delivering a string of industry firsts to the market.

Previous SiberCore industry firsts include delivery of:

• First multi-megabit density TCAM (December 1999) First TCAM to provide a three-port architecture for independent table maintenance (December 1999)
• First TCAM to incorporate dynamically variable word width support for 36-, 72-, 144- and 288- bits (August 2000)
• First TCAM capable of sustaining 100 MSPS; (December 2000) About SiberCore Technologies
  
  

SiberCore Technologies is a fabless communications semiconductor company providing silicon-based packet management products and solutions to the Internet infrastructure market. The Company's initial products are packet forwarding engines, based on Ternary Content Addressable Memory (TCAM) technology, that are designed to overcome the most onerous performance bottlenecks in the data communications market -- packet forwarding and classification. SiberCore's unique architectural and design innovations give the SiberCAM?family of products significant advantages in terms of capacity, speed, feature set and power reduction. SiberCore is located in Ottawa, Canada's high technology capital. The company's web site is located at www.sibercore.com