Reliable, High Performance PCI Express 3.0 PHY Offers Cray Time-to-Market Advantage

Burlington, Ontario, — October 29, 2009 — Gennum Corporation (TSX: GND) today announced that Cray Inc., a global supercomputer leader, has selected Gennum’s Snowbush IP Group’s PCI Express® (PCIe®) 3.0 PHY IP for use in its next generation, high performance supercomputer design.

The PCIe 3.0 PHY from Snowbush offers a time-to-market advantage by reducing both the development costs and engineering time to integrate PCIe functionality within Cray’s next generation of supercomputers. The full featured PCIe 3.0 PHY includes low power-per-lane performance, clean signal characteristics, in a small silicon footprint. Delivered as a hard macro with a PHY model, netlist, and static timing profile, Snowbush PHYs are easily integrated and validated in a design. All PHYs are backed by Snowbush’s world-class support.

“After an extensive evaluation of competitive solutions, we selected Snowbush’s high speed PCIe 3.0 PHY IP because it is the best solution available in the market today. Snowbush’s reputation for high quality, reliable first-pass silicon offered our designers confidence that incorporating this IP block into our newest supercomputer design will give us a competitive edge in the market place,” said Peg Williams, Senior Vice President of Research and Development at Cray.

Initially launched in June 2009, the Snowbush PCIe PHY satisfies the 8 GT/s speed requirement of PCIe 3.0, and exceeds the anticipated critical specifications for jitter performance over harsh channels. Low latency and power requirements in the link layer provide substantial margin to designers for creating robust products with excellent interoperability.

“Being the first to market with reliable first pass PCIe 3.0 IP silicon, is critical to ensuring that our customers get their new designs to market faster. Our leadership in developing serial-link IP at speeds of 5G or greater is encouraging Tier 1 customers, such as Cray, to adopt the IP and take advantage of this higher speed technology as they develop next generation interconnect solutions into their new designs,” said Ewald Liess, General Manager of the Snowbush IP group for Gennum.

About Snowbush PCIe 3.0 IP

Snowbush PCIe 3.0 IP is architected for low power and area on both the PHY and Data Link layer. The PCIe 3.0 PHY features a proprietary low power 5-tap Decision Feedback Equalization (DFE) and a high-pefromance H-bridge transmit driver. The PHY silicon footprint is small and includes the I/Os, ESD structures, and PCS Layer, in 1-, 2-, 3-, and 4-lane configurations to reduce silicon cost. Each lane of the PHY can be configured to operate in Gen 1, Gen 2, or Gen 3 mode. Multiple 4-lane PHYs can be configured as x8, x16, x32, and greater links. An on-chip Fractional-N PLL Frequency Synthesizer with integrated Spread Spectrum Clocking is used for simplified external clocking and reduced SoC complexity.

About the Gennum Snowbush IP Group

The Gennum Snowbush IP group offers a team of interconnect specialists to design and deliver silicon-proven, high-speed serial interface IP. Comprising one of the industry’s most robust, widely-deployed, production-tested and customizable family of IP cores, the Snowbush IP portfolio satisfies the needs of today’s most demanding high-speed serial communication protocols and applications. Snowbush IP offers integrated PHY and Controller solutions for standards like USB, PCI Express® and Serial ATA (SATA), and single and multi-standard SerDes for applications with data rates from 1 Gb/s to over 10 Gb/s. Gennum’s Snowbush IP group is committed to supporting customers with diverse foundry and process requirements, offering IP cores for TSMC, UMC, Common Platform, and Fujitsu processes. For more information visit www.snowbush.com

About Gennum

Gennum Corporation (TSX: GND) designs innovative semiconductor solutions and intellectual property (IP) cores for the world’s most advanced consumer connectivity, enterprise, video broadcast and data communications products. Leveraging the company’s proven optical, analog and mixed-signal products and IP, Gennum enables multimedia and data communications products to send and receive information without compromising the signal integrity. An award winner for advances in high definition (HD) broadcasting, Gennum is headquartered in Burlington, Canada, and has global design, research and development and sales offices in Canada, Mexico, Japan, Korea, Germany, United States, Taiwan, India and the United Kingdom. www.Gennum.com.



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