MITSUBISHI ELECTRIC, MOTOROLA AGREE TO EXCHANGE EMBEDDED DRAM SYSTEM LSI
TECHNOLOGY

Tokyo, October 7, 1996 -- Mitsubishi Electric Corporation (President: Takashi Kitaoka; hereafter referred to as Mitsubishi Electric) and Motorola Inc. (Vice Chairman and CEO: Gary L. Tooker; hereafter referred to as Motorola) today announced an agreement reached upon the exchange of technologies for system LSI with embedded DRAM.

According to the agreement, the two companies will exchange their technologies: Mitsubishi Electric's embedded DRAM* design/wafer process technologies and the M32R CPU core technology for Motorola's 68EC000* and ColdFire* CPU core technologies.

This technology exchange is aimed toward a joint development of common design architecture of embedded DRAM system LSI, which is a rapidly growing market, as well as the joint promotion of the business.

Background of the agreement:

The computer peripherals and multimedia products, essential for the information age, have been required to process a massive amount of data. Thus, logic ICs, such as CPUs, and DRAMs have been used and connected upon the printed circuit board. However, the problem is that processing speed of conventional method has its limitation, due to the wafer process, and there has been a growing concern in the industry. To solve the problem, the development of a single silicon chip (i.e. a system LSI) on which DRAM and MCU are embedded, is becoming an issue. It is expected to dramatically improve data processing speed.

Within the semiconductor manufacturing technology, the wafer process technologies for DRAM and logic circuits exist independently and are developed separately, which has made the two wafer processes extremely difficult to integrate.

Mitsubishi Electric, to respond to the market needs, has developed a wafer process to embed DRAM and logic circuit on a single chip, and has succeeded in producing M32R/D*, a product with 2Mbyte DRAM and M32R core (the c ompany's most advanced 32-bit RISC microprocessor) embedded on a single chip for the first time in the world.

Motorola, on the other hand, introduced the 68000 microprocessor in 1979, followed by the 68EC000 for embedded market. 68EC000 is widely used and recognized as a de-facto standard, mainly in the embedded LSI market. ColdFire's instruction set is optimized subset of Motorola's 680x0 family. Since many development tools of 68EC000 and ColdFire are already available in the market and at customers, designers can fully utilize those existing tools and minimize the development time.

The new products enable to further enhance the performance by embedding DRAM on a system LSI, and the new technology developed by Mitsubishi Electric is expected to add new applications to the conventional DRAM and microprocessor markets.

Contents of the agreement:

Motorola is ranked as the largest one-chip MCU manufacturer in the world, and Mitsubishi Electric is ranked as the third largest.

The agreement will enable the two companies to introduce new products of embedded DRAM system LSIs, by fully utilizing Mitsubishi Electric's embedded DRAM technology and the already commercialized products of the two companies : Mitsubishi Electric's M32R core and Motorola's 68EC000 and ColdFire CPU cores, which boast high reputation among wide range of customers.

This means, the two companies can create a brand-new system LSI market in a variety of fields, e.g. mass storage equipment and imaging equipment. Furthermore, the technology exchange of Mitsubishi Electric and Motorola will enable implementing standard LSI design tools, which are developed by the third parties for the common use of Mitsubishi Electric and Motorola, to the whole development procedure of customer specific ASIC products. This way, the reliability of the products will be increased.

Mitsubishi Electric and Motorola will jointly develop the embedded DRAM system LSI technology, and the new products will be added to their respective product line-ups. Both companies will manufacture and market separately under their own brand names.

Notes:

*     Embedded DRAM: a technology with which DRAM is designed exclusively for embedding on a system LSI.

*     68EC000: Motorola's microprocessor for embedded market, which is widely used in the industry.

*     ColdFire: Microprocessor developed by Motorola using the company's unique variable-length RISC technology, which enables RISC-based products to market more quickly and with lower costs.

*     M32R/D: Introduced by Mitsubishi Electric in February, 1996, as the first 32-bit RISC MCU with embedded DRAM in the world. 2Mbyte DRAM, 2Kbyte cache and 32-bit RISC MCU are integrated on a single chip.