1997-11-14 , ESC-9737

Philips Semiconductors and NEC sign landmark partnership agreement to target next generation consumer products with MIPS^® microprocessors

NEC Corporation (NEC) and Philips Semiconductors today signed a landmark partnership agreement targeting advanced consumer applications with the highly capable MIPS^® microprocessor architecture. In the initial stage of this agreement, NEC will provide its VR4300™ series 64-bit processor core, one of the most advanced MIPS^® processors, while Philips Semiconductors will work with NEC on chip integration and support technologies to make MIPS^® the global standard platform for the consumer area.

With consumer devices seeing a rapid convergence of computer and communications technologies, together with a demand for a larger number of functions, there are serious performance issues to be resolved. Moreover, there is an increasing necessity for a global platform to handle a new generation of consumer products that offers high performance for games, audio-visual and other equipment.

The suitability of MIPS^® for this task is already being proven in the market: global sales of these processors have soared in the last two years, with sales rising from 1.7 million units in 1994 to more than 19 million in 1996.

The agreement enables NEC and Philips Semiconductors to produce and market jointly developed products based on the MIPS^® architecture, with the goal of increasing their market share. The agreement also means that both companies will promote each other as alternative sources for the MIPS^® architecture, consolidating MIPS^® identity as a standard for consumer applications.

Customers will see greater benefits from the strength of this agreement between two of the major players in the field: greater security, such as the security of multi-source availability, greater customer support, together with increased processor functionality and applications.

"Strategic alliances are a core component of Philips Semiconductors' business strategy today and for the future," said Arthur van der Poel, Philips Semiconductors' chief executive officer. "Philips Semiconductors has a policy of ensuring that customers have immediate access to the latest technologies and the support to exploit these technologies into market-leading products. The agreement confirms both companies' commitment to the MIPS^® architecture and means that customers can rely on using MIPS^® as the global platform for developing consumer electronics products."

"Philips Semiconductors is an obvious partner for NEC, as the company's experience in the consumer electronics market coupled with our expertise in developing leading-edge MIPS^® technology will produce a powerful combination," said Hajime Sasaki, NEC's senior executive vice president responsible for its Semiconductor Group.

NEC and Philips Semiconductors work with the MIPS^® Group, part of Silicon Graphics Inc., which collaborates with leading semiconductor partners to design and develop leading-edge microprocessor architectures and software technologies. The high performance and the ability of processors based on the MIPS^® architecture to handle a large number of complex and audio-visual tasks makes them ideal for use in the demanding consumer-oriented applications that the companies are targeting.

Philips Semiconductors, a division of Philips Electronics NV, headquartered in Eindhoven, The Netherlands, is the ninth largest semiconductor supplier in the world. Philips Semiconductors' innovations in digital audio, video, and mobile technology position the company as a leader in the consumer, multimedia and wireless communications markets. Sales offices are located in all major markets around the world, and are supported by regional customer application labs.

NEC Corporation (NASDAQ: NIPNY) pioneered the concept of 'C&C', the integration of Computers and Communications, and is the only company in the world to be counted among top ranking corporations spanning the wide range of fields essential for this vision of multimedia: computers, communications and electron devices. Employing in excess of 150,000 people around the world, NEC saw net sales in fiscal year 1996-97 amount to 4,948 billion yen (approx. US$40 billion).

MIPS^® is a registered trademark of MIPS^® Technologies, Inc., a unit of Silicon Graphics, Inc. VR4300™ is a registered trademark of NEC Corporation

Main specifications of VR4300™ series:

Performance:	177 Dhrystone* MIPS® @ 133 MHz (internal)
Address/data bus:	32/32-bit
Memory space:	Physical: 4G bytes
	Virtual: 1T bytes
Package:	120-pin QFP
Features:	High speed operation from 133 MHz pipe. Large on-chip cache I16 K + D8K byte 64-bit architecture. High speed floating point operation. On chip MMU

* The Dhrystone Benchmark is a processor integer test; essentially it is an addition test to see how many times an addition can take place in a set period of time. This benchmark is primarily designed to test CPU performance. It is not designed to test system performance, which includes video, hard drive and other components. External Cache (L2) may sometimes affect the results of this test.