*****For immediate use May 24^th, 2001

NEC Introduces New Network Controller

"µPD98502"

Tokyo, May 24, 2001 - NEC^*1 Corporation and its semiconductor affiliates in the United States, NEC Electronics Inc., and Europe, NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH., today announced volume shipping of its new network controller device. The newest offering integrates PCI bridge functions into NEC's existing µPD98501 and extends NEC's network controller versatility in applications requiring a variety of data/signal exchange including residential and small business gateways, MTU (Multi-tenant Unit) aggregators, and xDSL modems and routers.

For several months NEC has been in production with its 100MHz µPD98501 network controllers and strong middleware products for xDSL data and voice solutions. The newest offering, the µPD98502, is targeted at broadband access applications such as xDSL routers and voice-over-DSL (VoDSL) due to the high-performance embedded CPU (MIPS® RISC 64-bit, 100MHz V_R4120A^TM*2 microprocessor) and variety of communication ports, such as two ports 10/100 Ethernet^TM, a 50 Mbps ATM interface and USB slave interface.

"Many communication protocols, such as HomePNA, Power Line Communication, IEEE1394, Bluetooth, IEEE802.11a and 11b will likely co-exist in the home. Exchanging high-speed data and real-time signals via these communication media will be handled by a residential gateway," said Chung Ho, assistant general manager of NEC Electronics' communications group. "With the convergence of integrated hardware/software solutions, standardization and deregulation, and high consumer demand, the residential gateway is an ideal means of communication in home networking. To be effective, this gateway requires a high-performance network controller, such as the µPD98502, with sufficient headroom for future expandability and to support the bandwidth required by the peripherals."

Implementing dedicated hardware to process the high data rate, in combination with a high-performance CPU with sophisticated software, is the key to NEC's Network Controller solution. NEC's µPD98502 with PCI bridge functionality operates at 32bits and 33MHz to handle various communication mediums on the PCI bus. The PCI bridge not only connects the desktop PC's peripherals, but also provides the system designer flexibility to connect the bus to a wide variety of LAN peripherals.

More on NEC's µPD98502

The µPD98502 leverages the architecture of the µPD98501 with the addition of the PCI bridge. Features of the µPD98502 are as follows:

1. High Performance embedded CPU:
   • MIPS-based Vr4120A
   • 128MIPS@100MHz, 16KB instruction cache, 8KB data cache

2. Glueless interface to 32MB of SDRAM and 8MB of Flash ROM

3. Variety of communication ports:
   • ATM Cell Processor
     • 50Mbps throughput
     • Embedded 32bit RISC processor for SAR functions
     • AAL0/2/5 support
     • CBR/VBR/ABR/UBR support
     • UTOPIA Level 2 interface

   • Ethernet Controller
     • Two ports of 10/100Mbps Ethernet MACs
     • Compliant with IEEE802.3, IEEE802.3u, IEEE802.3x
     • 3.3V MII interface

   • USB Controller
     • Compliant with USB Rev1.1
     • USB Communication Device Class support

   • PCI Bridge
     • Compliant with PCI Rev2.2
     • 32bits/33MHz operation

4. Other functions:
   • 2ch timer
   • 1ch UART
   • Boundary-scan compliant with IEEE1149.1

5. Supply Voltage:
   • I/O Interface: 3.3V, internal circuit: 2.5V

6. 500-pin TBGA package

Pricing and Availability

The µPD98502 is available now. Pricing is $25 in 10,000 unit quantities.

• About NEC Corporation
• About NEC Electronics Inc.
• About NEC Electronics (Europe) GmbH

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Notes:

*1:	NEC Electronics Inc. is either a registered trademark or trademark of NEC Corporation in the United States and/or other countries.
*2:	VR4120A is a trademark of NEC Corporation. All other registered trademarks or trademarks are property of their respective owners.

NEC Press Contacts:

In Japan Daniel Mathieson NEC Corporation TEL: +81-3-3798-6511 E-mail:d-mathieson@bu.jp.nec.com	In the U.S. Michele Healey NEC Electronics Inc. TEL: 408-588-6620 E-mail:michele_healey@el.nec.com
In Europe Kazuya Yoshida/ Katharine Murray TEL: +44-0-20-7853-5900 E-mail:kazuya.yoshida@uk.neceur.com katharine.murray@uk.neceur.com