CAMARILLO, Calif. - July 26, 2006 - Vitesse Semiconductor Corporation (VTSS.PK), today unveiled its latest high-speed crosspoint switches featuring breakthrough capacity and advanced Signal Integrity technology. Featuring a per-port speed of up to 6.5 Gbps and low-latency switching capabilities, the 72x72 VSC3172 and 144x144 VSC3144 asynchronous crosspoints deliver near-terabit aggregate bandwidth capacity. These crosspoints enable new cost and performance breakpoints for blade server, video and network equipment designs used in core, metro and enterprise environments. The new product additions underscore Vitesse’s leadership and continued investment in Signal Integrity and Crosspoint solutions along with record product line business growth.

Vitesse Crosspoint Switch Products and World Class Signal Integrity
Vitesse has been at the forefront of high performance crosspoint and signal integrity development for nearly ten years. Featuring 11 Gbps-per-port and 2 through 144 sized matrix selection, Vitesse's crosspoint portfolio offers the highest port capacity, broadest offering and best signal integrity performance in the business. Vitesse's integrated PixEQ™ Technology improves signal performance and reduces jitter associated with driving multi-Gigabit signals across PCBs, backplanes, and cables. Real-world results show that Vitesse PixEQ™ technology eliminates deterministic jitter over backplane channels up to 1 meter long and low cost, short-reach copper cabling. Vitesse components are used in a wide array of products from industry-leading OEMs.

“Early in our development, it became apparent that we needed to seamlessly connect multi-protocol fabrics without the need for hard wiring. Vitesse crosspoint products proved to be an ideal tool to address the protocols, switching and signal integrity demands of our application, and we were happy to use it as a key element in our system. We have planned other fabric interfaces with Vitesse’s unique crosspoint solutions,” stated Viswa Sharma, CTO/COO of CorEdge Networks.

Vitesse Raising the Bar on Performance and Price
The new crosspoint switches are tailored for cost-sensitive high-speed, high port count serial copper interconnect applications such as backplanes and box-to-box interconnect systems. These devices offer operating rates over 50% higher than previous generation devices at a substantially reduced cost to the end user. The higher data rate capability and protocol transparent operation are designed to match a broad range of application markets including HDTV, ATCA, SONET, Storage, and many others. Their nanosecond latency and 125 MHz programming rate make them suitable for system designs with tight timing budgets. Furthermore, the integrated programmable equalization (EQ) is designed to tame tough signal integrity challenges in backplanes and short-reach copper cabling.

“Vitesse was first to introduce integrated signal equalization in crosspoint switches and now has nearly a decade of successful product developments and key technology patents,” said Juan Garza, Vitesse Product Marketing Manager, Network Products Division. “With a portfolio offering dozens of products, we have shipped over a million units to a diverse customer base. The wide application and record unit shipments underscore the market demand for Crosspoint and Signal Integrity solutions as network, storage and HDTV equipment evolves to support next generation signaling and protocols.”

The 6.5 Gbps 72x72 VSC3172 and 144x144 VSC3144 asynchronous crosspoint switches feature a fully non-blocking switch core programmed through a flexible port interface. Per-channel and globally programmable input EQ and output pre-emphasis settings enable maximum customization for the application. Each high-speed output is a fully differential switched current driver with on-die terminations for optimum signal integrity. Core programming can be sequential on a port-byport basis, or multiple program assignments can be queued and issued simultaneously. Unused channels may be powered down to allow efficient use of the switch in applications that require only a subset of the channels.

These products are part of the most comprehensive crosspoint offering in the industry and serve as the backbone for building storage networking, cluster computing and network interconnects to meet the current and future IT needs of organizations around the world. More information on Vitesse’s Signal Integrity solutions can be found at www.Vitesse.com/SI.

Availability and Pricing
The introduced products include:

• VSC3172, 6.5 Gbps 72x72 asynchronous crosspoint
• VSC3144, 6.5 Gbps 144x144 asynchronous crosspoint

Sampling in September 2006, volume pricing for the VSC3172 and VSC3144 is $250 and $750 USD respectively.