SPREADTRUM UNVEILS NEW AVS VIDEO/AUDIO DECODER CHIP SV6100.

Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRD, "Spreadtrum"), one of China's leading wireless baseband chipset providers, has unveiled its new AVS video / audio decoder chip, the SV6100. AVS is the audio and video coding-decoding standard independently created by China. The SV6100 is designed for several fast growing, emerging video / audio markets in China including the IPTV, digital television, and satellite segments. The SV6100 represents another breakthrough in Spreadtrum's line of AVS video / audio decoder chips, following the launch last August of the world's first commercial AVS audio / video decoder chip, the SV6111. The SV6111 is an AVS/MPEG-2 SoC targeted at the high-end set-top box (STB) market and supports more functions, such as HD decoding and PVR (personal video recording).

Spreadtrum's SV6100 is an integrated AVS/MPEG-2 set-top-box decoder chip which supports AVS and MPEG2 SD video and most popular audio standards (including MPEG-1 Layer I&II, AAC, AVS). The SV6100 features the combination of a high performance transport processor, video/audio decoder, and a display controller with scaling. Utilizing advanced technology that integrates critical software with the hardware processing system, Spreadtrum's SV6100 combines strong processing capabilities with multimedia functions to produce a robust commercial solution with low cost and low power consumption. This highly integrated platform solution should provide designers the flexibility of matching various matured solutions with cost and time-to-market requirements.

The SV6100 contains key functions designed to support both current and future digital TV set-top boxes (STB), and can be applied to IPTV, cable digital TV, digital satellite TV, and DMB-T transmission standards based products. Compared with the SV6111, the SV6100 provides a full set of AVS SD (standard definition) decoder functions while still maintaining a low cost and low power design. It provides flexible integration capacities to a host chip on existing application platforms, which should help system designers generate quick time-to-market AVS based or multi-standard based IPTV STB models.

Professor Wen Gao, chairman of the AVS Workgroup of China, remarked, "As a leading design company in China's IC industry, Spreadtrum has dedicated significant efforts in developing China's home-grown AVS standard. It has been a very short time indeed for Spreadtrum to successfully develop the world's first commercial AVS audio / video decoder chip, the SV6111, and now the new AVS audio / video decoder chip, the SV6100. Spreadtrum's every step in its AVS chip development represents a quicker industrialization and commercialization of the AVS standard. I believe Spreadtrum provides a good model for China's AVS industry."

For more information on AVS, visit the Audio and Video Coding Standard Workgroup of China, at http://www.avs.org.cn/en.

Dr. Ping Wu, president and CEO of Spreadtrum, expressed, "Spreadtrum has been devoted to the research and product development of AVS technology for some years. We believe Spreadtrum not only has a leading position in AVS chip design and commercialization, but has been making important contributions to the advancement of the AVS standard. We feel the release of SV6100 shows that Spreadtrum has dug more deeply in the IPTV, digital television, and other video / audio market segments. I firmly believe that the SV6100 will help promote a quicker adoption of AVS by market and enable faster development of low power AVS chips. This latest version of AVS is an enhancement to the development of China's independently created source code standards, and a significant effort to advancing the overall information industry, too."

About shipment

At present, the SV6100 has performed well in field trials and has shown stable performances for each of the above mentioned broadcast applications. Spreadtrum has already commenced sampling of the SV6100, and expects deployment by its customers of commercial products, based on these chips, later this year.

About Spreadtrum

Spreadtrum Communications, Inc. (Nasdaq: SPRD; "Spreadtrum") is a fabless semiconductor company that designs, develops, and markets baseband processor solutions for the mobile wireless communications market. Spreadtrum combines its semiconductor design expertise with its software development capabilities to deliver highly-integrated baseband processors with multimedia functionality and power management. Spreadtrum has developed its solutions based on an open development platform, enabling its customers to develop customized wireless products that are feature-rich and meet their cost and time-to-market requirements.

For more information, visit http://www.spreadtrum.com.