SAN JOSE, Calif., January 31, 2000 -- High-bandwidth network IC provider Allayer Communications today announced the appointment of Mohan Maheswaran to the newly created post of vice president of marketing, effective immediately. In this position, Maheswaran will play a pivotal role in shaping Allayerıs new product direction and developing the companyıs marketing strategy. A semiconductor industry veteran with more than 15 years of sales, marketing and business unit management experience, Maheswaran most recently served as Vice President of Strategy at IBM Microelectronics. In this role, he was instrumental in turning this $6 billion business unit from a commodity-driven, low-margin operation to a market-driven, profitable business. He was responsible for IBM Microelectronics strategy including identifying high-growth markets, determining product direction, setting marketing and sales strategic objectives and driving the divisionıs strategic planning and emerging technology roadmaps.

"We are delighted to have Mr. Maheswaran join us as Vice President of Marketing," says Dr. Cheng-chung Shih, president and founder of Allayer Communications. "His recent experience in identifying new markets and shaping strategies to meet market needs will fit well with our goals at Allayer. As we ride the wave of the explosive growth of the communications infrastructure, we need expert marketing guidance to focus our efforts on our next generation products. Mr Maheswaran is ideally suited to pinpoint the most appropriate market opportunities for our core competencies and to direct Allayerıs marketing efforts in exploiting those opportunities."

Prior to his tenure at IBM Microelectronics, Maheswaran spent nearly ten years at Texas Instruments in a number of sales, marketing, application and business management roles, primarily with the ASIC Products Group where he managed the global strategic marketing operations and managed the ASIC portfolio including its standard cell, gate array and, programmable logic devices. During his time with TI, he also served in Europe as European manager for marketing, sales and applications for TI ASIC Programmable products. Prior to joining Texas Instruments, Maheswaran held various design engineering and program management positions at Hewlett-Packard Company, and Nortel Networks. Maheswaran holds a BSEE from Surrey University and an MBA degree from Henley Management College in the U.K.

As Vice President of Marketing, Maheswaran is responsible for managing all marketing activities of the company and is a member of the executive staff. He reports directly to Dr. Cheng-chung Shih, president and CEO. Among his responsibilities will be shaping the marketing strategy of the company, defining new products, targeting new market opportunities, and managing the public relations, advertising, marketing communications and web-based programs.

"Allayer is a vibrant company in a hot market area," says Mr. Maheswaran. "There is no question that accelerating the development of the Internet infrastructure is one of the key opportunities for semiconductor suppliers in this decade. Allayer is ideally positioned to take its patented switch architecture into a number of emerging vertical segments across the Internet. I was particularly impressed with the talent and execution focus of the Allayer team. Allayer has a unique combination of network system design expertise and mixed-signal ASIC design abilities, and a world-class design and manufacturing operation. I am pleased to join Allayer and add my marketing expertise to the Allayer team."

About Allayer

Allayer Communications was founded in 1997 to design, develop, manufacture and market high-performance silicon solutions for the global network. The company utilizes a combination of leading edge architecture, mixed-signal design expertise and multiple silicon process technologies to offer IC products for the Gigabit Ethernet and Fast Ethernet communications market. The corporate name -- pronounced "All-layer" -- represents the companyıs long-range intention to provide silicon solutions for all levels of the OSI networking model.

Allayer is backed by over $12.5 million in venture funding from Greylock, Acer Capital America, VenGlobal Capital. Allayer's corporate headquarters is located in San Jose. Sales and consulting engineering offices are located throughout the world. For further information about Allayer and its products, please contact: Marketing Communication Department, Allayer Communications, 107 Bonaventure Drive, San Jose, CA 95134, phone: 408/570-0888, or visit the corporate Web site at: http://www.allayer.com.

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