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Frontier Silicon announces enhanced product development environment for Chorus DAB processor

New Tools will Speed Customer Projects to Market

London, UK - 9th October, 2003 - Frontier Silicon, the fabless semiconductor business whose core products include system-on-chip (SoC) devices for digital TV, digital radio and other emerging consumer multimedia products, today announced an advanced suite of development tools for its Chorus DAB and digital audio processor.

The toolset will enable Frontier Silicon customers to further shorten development times for new Chorus based products. Chorus is already the most successful DAB digital audio processor in the world with over 300,000 units shipped. In addition to its core DAB capability the flexible programmability of Chorus, based on the powerful multi-threaded META DSP/RISC core licensed from Imagination Technologies, allows manufacturers to choose to include codecs such as MP3, MPEG4 video decode, and an ever growing list of other advanced capabilities into their products.

The new toolset is based on CodeScape® 5, the latest version of the popular toolchain for META. It delivers rich functionality gained from over a decade of supporting embedded developers worldwide.

The toolset provides DAB product manufacturers with an impressive code development environment with advanced features such as powerful IDE, project management and virtual prototyping. Working alongside CodeScape is an enhanced version of the GNU toolchain providing familiar and stable support for C/C++ development.

Said Steve Evans, VP Sales Frontier Silicon: "The introduction of these new tools will significantly reduce development time when our customers want to customize our Chorus product with their own software and value-add. The recent porting of the full Linux kernel to the META core has proved the robustness and flexibility of the CodeScape tools. We expect these tools will reinforce Chorus' number one position in the DAB market."

Says Ian Oliver, VP of Development, CodeScape: "CodeScape was designed to enable rapid development of complex real-time embedded software. With this latest release we have built on this strong foundation to provide many new features that will speed the development of advanced DAB products while ensuring that the entire development environment remains easy to use."

The toolset provides developers with a straightforward programming interface to the multi-threaded META™ DSP enabling developers to implement sophisticated algorithms to complement the integrated DAB capability of Chorus. This will further increase Chorus' impact in a broad range of applications including data transmission and video as well as digital radio.

Editor's Notes

CodeScape and META are trademarks or registered trademarks of Imagination Technologies Ltd.

About Frontier Silicon

Operating at the frontiers of the digital revolution Frontier Silicon is a fabless semiconductor business whose core products include system-on-chip (SoC) devices and RF baseband modules for digital TV, digital radio and other emerging consumer multimedia products. Frontier's key customers include consumer electronic, automotive entertainment and PDA/mobile phone manufacturers.