Ambric Wins In-Stat's 2006 Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Award for Innovation

BEAVERTON, Ore. — February 20, 2007 — Ambric® Inc. announced it has been presented with In-Stat's 2006 Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Award in the newly created "Innovation" category for its Am2000™ family of scalable integrated circuits (ICs) architecture. The award was announced today in the on-line edition of Microprocessor Report (MPR), published by the semiconductor research firm, In-Stat, Scottsdale, Ariz. See http://www.mdronline.com for more information on the awards.

"Most massively-parallel chip companies started with the hardware, leaving the programming model almost as an afterthought," said Tom R. Halfhill, senior analyst, Microprocessor Report. "Ambric took the right approach by starting with a relatively straightforward programming model and then creating a flexible, innovative hardware architecture to enable it. If Ambric's tools work as well as the company promises, they will significantly advance the art of programming massively-parallel arrays. This is why In-Stat gave an MPR Analysts' Choice Award in the 'Innovation' category to Ambric for its approach to chip design."

"We are very honored to be selected for this prestigious award," said Howard Bubb, CEO and chairman of Ambric. "The Am2000 family's key innovation is the structural object-programming model that we designed to make concurrent programming intuitive and practical. Concurrency is straightforward and reliable when each program is fully encapsulated with its own processing resources and asynchronous messaging supported in hardware. The silicon provides full support for this programming model. Programming our chip will be dramatically faster with higher re-use than VLIW assembly coding for DSPs or RTL for FPGAs. Because our architecture enables linear scalability of both the hardware and the software, Ambric will keep pace with Moore's Law at 65-nanometers and beyond."

About the Ambric Chip Architecture

The Ambric Am2000 family of scalable integrated circuits (ICs), first announced at the In-Stat Fall Microprocessor Forum in 2006, is the world's first teraOPS-class chips using globally asynchronous, locally synchronous (GALS) architecture that enables massively-parallel solutions for complex embedded applications. Ambric's new chips feature teraOPS-level performance and an innovative, structural object-programming model that dramatically accelerates embedded application development and debug. Initial target markets for the chips are complex, high-performance video and image processing applications, with other applications for the broader, high-end digital signal processing (DSP) and field-programmable gate array (FPGA) markets to follow. Due to the GALS architecture and the ease of tiling hundreds of compute-units, Ambric has a robust roadmap for future devices that will have over 700 processors and multi-teraOPS throughput. Because of these efficiencies, Ambric designed its current chip, which has over 100 million transistors, with only one-fifth of typical IC engineering resources. Ambric's initial chip family is now at the pre-production commercial silicon stage with hundreds of processors running substantial applications.

About the In-Stat Microprocessor Report Analysts' Choice Awards

In-Stat's Microprocessor Report analyst staff made all the nominations and selections. Some, if not most, nominees required additional research. The staff considered everything new that they saw or heard about in 2006. The award selection process took just over a month. Each of the eight awards was reached by consensus of the Microprocessor Report staff. The "Innovation" category is a new one created this year. Notable winners of last year's MPR Analysts' Choice Awards include the Sony, Toshiba, and IBM Cell Broadband Engine in the "Best High-Performance Embedded Processor" category and the Intel Core Duo Centrino platform in the "Best PC Processor" category.

Articles on each of the current award recipients will begin appearing in Microprocessor Report (today) February 20, 2007. Abstracts of these articles can be viewed at http://www.mdronline.com/watch/watch_archives.asp?Type=EPW. For a free download of the Microprocessor Report's article on Ambric, see http://www.ambric.com/news/.

About Ambric, Inc.

Ambric is a fabless semiconductor company that has developed the world's first chip that makes massively-parallel software programming practical for complex embedded electronics systems. The company's scalable, teraOPS-class chips deliver performance that is more than an order of magnitude higher than high-end DSPs and rivals the performance of FPGAs on many applications. Ambric products will help electronics companies accelerate time-to-market for their products while slashing their system development costs.

Established in 2003 and headquartered in Beaverton, Ore., Ambric has received funding from ComVentures, OVP Venture Partners, Northwest Technology Ventures, and private investors. Visit http://www.ambric.com for the latest news and information on the company.

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