Santa Clara, CA, Jan. 20, 2004 - Bay Microsystems, a leader in high performance network processing, today announced it has been awarded 2003 Product Of The Year in the category of Best Traffic Management Product by analogZONE, the webzine for electronics design engineers that reviews hundreds of products each year. Bay's Biscayne™ processor was selected for outstanding achievement in chip design, possessing exceptional technical merit and design innovation, as well as well-targeted marketability.

With its programmable classification processing, Biscayne can parse, classify and police packets and cells at rates up to 16 Gbps, at minimum packet size and regardless of traffic patterns. At 16Gbps for both ingress and egress, and with power dissipation of only four watts, Biscayne is the industry's lowest power processor solution of its kind. Biscayne connects seamlessly to Bay's Montego®, its award winning single chip OC-192c/10G programmable internetworking processor, traffic manager and SAR. Based on the same deterministic, superscalar, pipelined architecture as Montego, Biscayne supports a wide range of existing and emerging applications and protocols, including Ethernet, IPv6, IPv4, ATM, Packet over SONET, Frame Relay, MPLS and DiffServ.

"The choice for our Best Traffic Management Product award was especially difficult to make this year, thanks to the many excellent products that crowded the field, but in the end, Bay's Biscayne device distinguished itself in a number of critical areas," said Lee Goldberg, senior technical editor of networkZONE. "For one thing, its stateful recursive search and inspection capabilities allow it to do exceptionally powerful packet analysis needed for highly-granular policy enforcement. But while several traffic managers offer nearly as much versatility and power, Biscayne stands alone in its ability to effectively manage traffic across system boundaries, otherwise known as 'QoS internetworking.' This internetworking capability dovetails nicely with its companion, the Montego internetworking processor. Together, they provide the processing power and architectural features required to support the complex, mixed-service environments that will characterize the emerging access and metro markets for the foreseeable future."

"Winning this award is a testament to the engineering team here at Bay," said Chuck Gershman, president and CEO of Bay Microsystems. "Having another award winning traffic management product recognized for its innovation and marketability strengthens our position in the market as we move towards profitability this year."

analogZONE is the premier source for electronics design engineers working in the fields of power management, audio/video, acquisition, HF/RF, i/o, networking and green engineering. Seven sub-ZONES covering these specific areas enable the designer to focus directly on products of interest.

Bay Microsystems is a privately held, fabless communications IC company delivering a family of programmable network processors. Bay's Internetworking Processor™ (InP) Family is scalable, intelligent, and ultra-high performance, suited for the full range of carrier class products from "Access to Long-Haul". The InP Family includes the industry's first OC192c/10G processor capable of classification, policing, segmentation and reassembly, and traffic management at wire rate.

Bay's InP products are already in use within broadband networks developed by the US Government and commercial providers serving the metro-edge, metro-core, regional and long-haul markets. Bay's seasoned management and world-class engineering teams have three generations of proven expertise in architecture, implementation, deployment, marketing and management of network processors. For more information visit the website at www.baymicrosystems.com.

Bay Microsystems, Biscayne, Internetworking Processor, Montego, and NEXTware are trademarks of Bay Microsystems. All other trademarks are the property of their respective holders.