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Once again demonstrating the company’s commitment to maintaining and maximizing the value of customer investments while building on its technology leadership, Radstone Embedded Computing today unveiled its strategic roadmap. At the heart of the company’s plans is a commitment to the development of new products that will support the VITA 46/VITA 48 standard in parallel with the development of products based on the VMEbus architecture. At the same time, Radstone committed to continuing to develop products based on future generations of the existing Freescale PowerPC processor as well as to develop products based on integrated bridge processor architectures such as the MPC 8641. Finally, the company indicated that, while 6U form factor solutions would continue to be developed, increased emphasis would be placed on support for the 3U form factor demanded by the space- and weight constrained applications that are increasingly the focus of new developments among military customers. “Given the long term nature of the majority of today’s military programs, it’s important for our customers to know what they can expect from Radstone in the coming years,” said Peter Cavill, President of Radstone Embedded Computing. “This announcement publicly reinforces our long term strategy of continuing to deliver to our customers products and services that precisely meet their needs in terms of performance, feature set, reliability, compatibility, upgradeability and, of course, price. Our roadmap is the strongest it has ever been, and demonstrates Radstone’s unparalleled commitment to our customers. We will announce new products in the near future that reinforce that commitment.” Commits to VITA 46, VITA 48 in parallel with VMEbus development Radstone is committed to supporting the VITA 46 and VITA 48 standards in future products, because they deliver a unique set of customer benefits: • Retention of existing 3U and 6U form factors • Make provision for military standard ruggedization • Provision of access to high speed I/O, serial switched fabrics • Improved thermal management characteristics These characteristics deliver unique levels of compatibility with, interoperability with and technology insertion opportunities for, existing systems while making provision for the increasing power and heat dissipation of future technologies. The company will, in parallel, continue to develop new products based on the existing VMEbus standard. Radstone currently has test bench VITA 46 systems - presently PCI Express-based - for internal evaluation. Early customer evaluation VITA 46 products are expected to ship in the early part of 2006. Commits to Freescale roadmap Radstone’s endorsement and support of the industry standards that are at the heart of the military, aerospace and defense commercial off-the-shelf (COTS) market is underlined by its decision to follow the PowerPC product roadmap through successive iterations that will deliver increasing price/performance over time. Customer benefits include: • interoperability with existing/legacy systems • technology insertion/upgrade opportunities The company will also launch new product families based on alternative processor architectures for specific applications. Commits to 3U Form Factor The military and defense market is increasingly characterized by demand for small footprint system solutions in space-constrained applications such as unmanned vehicles, a strategic market for Radstone. The 3U form factor – for which VITA 46 includes a definition - responds to this requirement. Note for Editors Freescale Roadmap The architecture of Radstone’s extensive family of single board computers is based around the PowerPC processor, a strategic decision that has allowed the company to deliver to its customers successive generations of products that have been characterized by increasing levels of performance while maintaining compatibility with preceding products – allowing customers to leverage that increased performance with minimum effort. Recent enhancements have seen the MPC 7447 become the MPC 7447A, with the most recent development being the MPC 7448. Radstone expects this processor family to continue to develop, and to be supplemented by new PowerPC architectures over time – notably with the Freescale 8641, which is expected to ship in volume late in 2006. VITA 46, 48 Designed specifically for the defense and aerospace companies who comprise the large majority of Radstone’s customers, VITA 46 will feature a new, 7-row connector rated at up to 6.25 Gbps that will allow VMEbus-based systems access to the benefits of today’s high speed serial fabric technologies, enabling the productive life of legacy systems to be considerably lengthened. VITA 48 adds capabilities for two-level maintenance and liquid cooling. About Radstone Embedded Computing Radstone Embedded Computing is a global provider of market-leading embedded computer products and services to major defense and aerospace contractors worldwide. The company designs and manufactures high-performance embedded computer products based on leading-edge commercial technologies and include the most innovative and rugged single board computers, sensor and digital signal processors, graphics and imaging processors, networking and communications modules. For more information, visit the company’s web site at: http://www.radstone.com