London, 6 July 2006, Aspex Semiconductor, today announced that in order to meet the demand for its Accelera HD Encoder platform it has signed a distribution agreement with Polar Graphics Ltd. This agreement will ensure that customers throughout Europe will be able to obtain Aspex’s Accelera HD MPEG-2 Encoder for real-time MPEG-2 encoding, as well as their forthcoming H.264 and WM9/VC-1 encoders.

Aspex selected Polar Graphics to distribute their encoder products on the basis of Polar’s industry expertise and sales success. Polar Graphics has over ten years of experience in sales and service within the film, TV and multimedia industries. As one of Europe’s most recognised distributors, Polar will distribute Aspex’s Accelera HD Encoder throughout the whole of Europe.

"I am very excited by this agreement as I have been very impressed with Aspex’s ability to scale processing power, and the flexibility of their software programmable processors to ensure that with future software updates the same board will support MPEG-2, H.264 and WM9/VC-1 encoding,” said Garry Davis, technical director, Polar Graphics Ltd. “The Accelera HD Encoder uses these capabilities to either encode a single MPEG-2 HD or 4 SD streams in real time, or a single SD stream at 4x real time,” he continued. “The other amazing thing is that by Aspex partnering with MainConcept the card can be used to seamlessly accelerate MPEG-2 encoding in many leading applications which contain the MainConcept codec.”

Aspex's ultra-high performance Accelera PCI-X card brings affordable high quality, realtime HD video compression to the desktop. By transparently accelerating MainConcept's industry-leading MPEG-2 video compression API, the Accelera board turbo charges video compression inside many leading applications, such as Adobe Premiere Pro 2.0, Autodesk Cleaner XL, Sony Vegas, Adobe Encore 2.0, and Sonic DVDit Pro.

The Accelera HD Encoder is built around Aspex's 100 per cent software programmable Linedancer family of Extreme Processors, allowing new codecs and image processing functions to be downloaded and run instantly.

For more information, please contact Polar Graphics at: +44 (0) 20 8868 2479, Fax: +44 (0) 20 8866 8207 Email to: info@polar-graphics.com

About Aspex Semiconductor

Aspex Semiconductor is a leading edge fabless semiconductor company specialising in the delivery of extreme processors. These high-performance programmable processors replace FPGAs, ASICs and DSPs at a fraction of the cost.

Aspex enables customers to reduce component costs, shorten time to market and reduce risk by moving to software defined platforms. In addition, the company offers services to speed adoption of Aspex products. Aspex Semiconductor has successfully demonstrated its architecture in the market place and by optimising the unique benefits of the Aspex processor family, customers are able to keep pace with the most demanding market conditions. Headquartered in Buckinghamshire, UK, Aspex serves clients and partners worldwide.