The Khronos Group - a non-profit industry consortium to develop, publish and promote open standard, royalty-free media authoring and acceleration standards for desktop and handheld devices, combined with conformance qualification programs for platform and device interoperability.

New SMEDIA Technology Corporation Launches into the Multimedia IC Design Market

October 25, 2004 - PT/Expocomm, Beijing, China: SMEDIA TECHNOLOGY CORP is pleased to announce their immediate launch as the first IC design company in Taiwan to offer comprehensive design capabilities, including graphics, video, and imaging-related multimedia ICs.

The initial capital size of SMEDIA is US$ 6 million, and the major shareholder is United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC; TSE: UMC). Currently, there are 60 employees in SMEDIA, with 70% of them in R&D. Mr. HY Lin, General Manager of SMEDIA, was previously the Senior Vice President of Integrated Technology Express, Inc. (TSE: ITE). Many of the R&D, Sales and Marketing staff at SMEDIA are formerly from the Multimedia Product Department of Silicon Integrated System (TSE:SiS). Because of this extensive background in developing cutting-edge multimedia products; SMEDIA is now able to offer the most advanced graphics accelerator, imaging and video technologies from SiS; together with the unique power-saving design developed by SMEDIA to offer market-leading mobile multimedia co-processors for hand held devices.

Along with the announcement of the new company, SMEDIA is also very pleased to announce Glamo 3360, a co-processor designed for accelerating the multimedia features of camera mobile phones. Glamo 3360 has the same level processor for image signal as a digital camera, and provides a completely hardwired JPEC/MPEG/H.263 encoder/decoder.

Glamo 3360 is the first highly-integrated IC for mobile phone including all the current visual functions demanded by consumers today. Glamo 3360 is unique in that it is the first co-processor with a built-in full 2D graphic accelerator engine (following the J2ME standard) and a 3D graphic accelerator engine (following the OpenGL ES® API and the D3DM standard). Under current camera mobile phone architecture, Glamo 3360 could help to easily upgrade a standard camera mobile phone to be a “media mobile phone,” with Video Conference, Video Recording, Graphic User Interface, and Complex 3D Games. .

SMEDIA is also pleased to announce that they have been invited by the Khronos Group to demonstrate the new Glamo technology on the Khronos group Booth #6675 at PT Expocomm, Beijing on October 26-30, 2004; and that Alan Tsai, Deputy Director of the R&D department at SMEDIA will lecture developers about their extensive experience with hardwired graphic acceleration on OpenGL ES at a session at PT/Expocomm on October 27th, from 9:30 to 16:00 in Session Room #221 Seminar Room - 2nd Floor CIEC Service Building. SMEDIA has been a member of the Khronos Group for several years and is committed to the development of OpenGL ES; a graphic API developed for 3D handheld devices. The Khronos Group focuses on developing OpenGL ES and OpenML for different applications. These royalty-free and open standards API can be applied to various platforms and peripherals, and provide play/edit functions for motion media.

“SMEDIA is glad to be invited to lecture on this important new graphic specification at PT/Expocomm, as they feel OpenGL ES is a large contributor to driving quality 3D graphics into the mobile handset market,” said Mr. HY Lin, General Manager of SMEDIA. “SMEDIA will continue to support OpenGL ES across their co-processor line of products and is working with a wide range of third parties to deliver middleware and engine solutions.”