COGENCY LAUNCHES ADVANCED HOMEPLUG POWERLINE NETWORKING CHIPSET
Highly integrated, HomePlug-compliant chipset provides customers with cost-effective home networking solution

Toronto, Ontario, December 3, 2001 -- Cogency Semiconductor Inc., a leading provider of high-performance semiconductors for the fast-growing home networking market, today announced the launch of PiranhaT, its next-generation HomePlug-compliant powerline home networking chipset.

"By delivering a chipset with features that are important to home and consumer electronic equipment manufacturers such as cost-effectiveness and ease-of-use, Cogency has raised the bar for HomePlug 1.0 chipsets, " said Ron Glibbery, CEO and President, Cogency Semiconductor. "With powerline networking being so convenient and intuitive for consumers, Piranha will drive many new and exciting products."

The Piranha chipset consists of the CS1100 and the AD9875. The CS1100 is a single-chip HomePlug 1.0 compliant MAC/PHY with the flexibility of a firmware-based approach that can be easily customized to accommodate new customer applications. The AD9875 Mixed-Signal Front End is a high performance, low-power converter for powerline communications. The chipset enables Ethernet-class networking over existing electrical wiring with full Quality-of-Service (QoS) support and privacy ensured through encryption.

Piranha also includes features such as multiple priority level access and segment bursting that further enhance real time delivery of delay sensitive content, making it well suited for streaming media and IP telephony applications. The CS1100's IEEE 802.3u-standard Media Independent Interface (MII) can be configured so that it can be paired with virtually any embedded media access controller (MAC) in a variety of consumer electronic devices. A general purpose 8-bit CPU bus control interface is provided for integrating the CS1100 to an embedded CPU, DSP or microcontroller.

The AD9875 is being used as part of the chipset in partnership with Analog Devices. "We are pleased to work with Cogency in creating a truly compelling powerline home networking chipset," said ADI's Joseph DiPilato, Product Line Manager, Communication Specific Integrated Products. "We are committed to providing efficient analog front-end products to enable 'Smart Partitioning' for targeted applications. We believe this chipset will make HomePlug powerline technology a very attractive solution for a broad range of consumer products."

Compliant with the industry standard HomePlug 1.0 specification, the Piranha chipset has been optimized for shared broadband access, low-latency audio and video streaming, and high-reliability networking at data rates up to 14 Mb/second. Target applications for the Piranha include: PC network adapters, Ethernet bridges, residential gateways such as set-top boxes, and a wide range of entertainment and communication devices such as jukeboxes, MP3 audio players, networked speakers and Internet radios.

According to Cahners In-Stat, the connected home market is predicted to grow from US $1.4 billion in 2001 to US $9.2 billion worldwide by 2006. Allied Business Intelligence indicates that the home networking silicon market represents one of the fastest growth integrated circuit (IC) markets over the next few years. Worldwide revenues from home networking chips, driven by embedded implementations, are poised to grow from US $49 million in 2000 to US $887 million by 2006.

Piranha and HomePlug The HomePlug Powerline Alliance is an industry consortium established to provide a forum for the development of an open specification of home powerline networking products and services. In June 2001, it announced the completion and release of its much-anticipated first generation high-speed powerline networking specification. Through the release of the HomePlug 1.0 specification, the Alliance provides its membership with a robust, field-proven industry specification upon which Alliance member companies will build interoperable products to enable the connected home.

Cogency's Piranha chipset implements the HomePlug 1.0 specification, incorporating advanced channel adaptation technology for maximum data throughput and connection quality, even in an electrically noisy powerline channel. This multi-carrier modulation technology, called orthogonal frequency division multiplexing (OFDM), uses signal-processing techniques that "learn" the channel conditions and adjust the transmitted signal to obtain the maximum achievable throughput. Other proprietary powerline networking products have lacked such capability and have been unable to achieve the throughput and whole-house coverage of HomePlug technology.

Pricing and availability The Piranha chipset will sample this month. Volume production is scheduled to commence in the first quarter of calendar year 2002. The CS1100 operates from 3.3 V I/O and 1.8 V core power supplies and is packaged in a 100-pin low profile quad flat pack (LQFP). The AD9875 operates from a 3.3 V power supply and is packaged in a 48-pin LQFP. The Piranha chipset Evaluation Kit consists of two evaluation boards, Microsoft Windows drivers, a suite of software support tools and is priced at US $5,000. The HomePlug-compliant chipset is priced at US $23.00 in quantities of 25,000 units.

About Cogency Semiconductor Cogency designs and markets high-performance semiconductors for the home networking market. Using its extensive expertise in OFDM-based systems and IC design, Cogency is a leading supplier of semiconductor products based on the HomePlug Powerline Alliance 1.0 specification for powerline home networking. Working closely with industry partners and customers, Cogency's products enable highly integrated and cost-effective system designs. Founded in 1997, Cogency is a privately- held company with offices in Irvine, California, Toronto and Ottawa, Ontario. For more information on the company, please visit www.cogency.com .

For more information on the HomePlug Powerline Alliance, see www.homeplug.org .