UpZide Expands Business Relationship With Tensilica, Developing Multi-Core VDSL2

LULEA, Sweden & SANTA CLARA, Calif.--(Business Wire)--UpZide Labs AB and Tensilica(R), Inc., today announced an expanded
business relationship under which UpZide will take their reference
Vectorized VDSL2 (second generation Very high-speed Digital Subscriber
Line) design to market in a chipset using over 50 Xtensa(R) LX2
configurable processors. Vectorized VDSL2 technology is seen as key to
delivering VoIP (voice over Internet protocol), VoD (video on demand)
and HDTV (high-definition television) simultaneously over standard
telephone lines.

"Our unique scalable architecture is built on multiple Xtensa
processors," said UpZide's CEO, Dr. Mikael Isaksson. "The programmable
nature of this platform allows for efficient future upgrades,
compliance to standard enlargements, customizations and customer niche
optimizations for both control plane (firmware) and data plane
(transceiver). It also allows us to use an advanced system simulation
environment to ensure end-to-end system validation quality."

UpZide's solution builds on the existing and continued roll out of
FTTN (fiber-to-the-network) VDSL2 deployment by significantly
increasing both data rates and reach over the existing copper network
and providing operators with an economically and timely alternative to
FTTH (fiber-to-the-home). UpZide believes its Vectored VDSL is the
next step in large scale broadband roll-outs. Vectoring overcomes the
performance limitations of VDSL2 with a capital expenditure that is
several multiples less than required for FTTH in brown-field
deployments, making it the solution of choice for operators as they
increase their offering of value-added services.

"UpZide's team has strong expertise gained from designing several
VDSL platforms in various semiconductor technologies, including FPGAs,
ASICs and DSPs, since 1995," stated Steve Roddy, Tensilica's vice
president of marketing. "As we've worked together over the past two
years, UpZide has found that our Xtensa configurable processors are
ideal for this project because they can be optimised precisely for
this application. This makes them much faster and energy efficient
than standard control processors, enabling UpZide to design a
processor based solution with the power-area efficiency previously
only attainable with hard-coded RTL design methodologies."

Copyright Business Wire 2008