TowerJazz CIS Technology Selected by Canesta

MIGDAL HAEMEK, Israel & SUNNYVALE, CA--(BUSINESS WIRE)--TowerJazz, the global specialty foundry leader, announced that Canesta Inc. is using TowerJazz's CMOS image sensor (CIS) technology to manufacture its innovative CanestaVision 3D image sensors. CanestaVision chips are the industry's world's first single-chip CMOS 3D image sensor System on a Chip (SoC) for use in consumer desktop computing, TV and entertainment applications. Next-generation consumer 3D image sensors designed to enable a device to understand and interact with its environment will fuel the image sensor market. According to iSuppli, the CMOS image sensor market was $7.3 Billion in 2007. It is expected to grow to $9.7 Billion in 2012.

3D image sensors enable consumers to interact with devices in natural ways and are expected to be widely deployed in a variety of markets including PC, consumer electronics and entertainment as well as many industry applications, among others. New mechanisms in which a user's actions or gestures drive the functions of a device have been proven by the success of recent video game and mobile phone products.

"We have a great deal of sophisticated and unique intellectual property in our chips," said Jim Spare, President and CEO of Canesta. "We are excited to have the use of TowerJazz's advanced CMOS image sensor manufacturing processes." Spare explained that 3D image sensors are critically important to evolve to natural user interfaces for complex consumer electronic products. "We are seeing early versions of this in the form of waving at systems to control them. Our chips will enable systems to do this as well as the fine-grained, close-up control that goes beyond multi-touch and is key to future applications. Over the next decade, we are likely to see new, innovative applications that require an integrated 3D image sensor with advanced characteristics."

"Canesta's solution is the most robust in the industry, offering the best performance compared to any other competing solution. The very tight R&D collaboration and roadmap alignment between our two companies provides near and long term innovative solutions that will further improve performance and power consumption in future generations and will allow wins in many more applications, such as the mobile computing area," said Dr. Avi Strum, Vice President and General Manager of Specialty Business Unit, TowerJazz.

About Canesta
Canesta is the inventor of revolutionary, low cost electronic perception technology and leading provider of single chip CMOS 3D sensors that fundamentally change the relationship between devices and their users. This capability makes possible "the other side of 3D"—true 3D perception as input to everyday devices, rather than the widely understood 3D representational technologies as output. Canesta's 3D input technology, based upon tiny, CMOS 3D imaging chips or "sensors", enables fine-grained, 3Dimensional depth-perception in a wide range of applications. Products based on this capability can then react on sight to the actions or motions of individuals and objects in their field of view, gaining levels of functionality and ease of use that were simply not possible in an era when such devices were blind. Canesta's focus is on mass market consumer electronics, but many applications exist in other markets as well. Some of Canesta's customers and partners include Hitachi, Honda, Optex, Optronic, Quanta, SMSC, and others which have yet to be announced.

Canesta is located in Sunnyvale, CA. The company has filed in excess of fifty patents, 41 of which have been granted so far.

About TowerJazz
Tower Semiconductor Ltd. (NASDAQ:TSEM) (TASE:TSEM), the global specialty foundry leader and its fully owned U.S. subsidiary Jazz Semiconductor, operate collectively under the brand name TowerJazz, manufacturing integrated circuits with geometries ranging from 1.0 to 0.13-micron. TowerJazz provides industry leading design enablement tools to allow complex designs to be achieved quickly and more accurately and offers a broad range of customizable process technologies including SiGe, BiCMOS, Mixed-Signal and RFCMOS, CMOS Image Sensor, Power Management (BCD), and Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) as well as MEMS capabilities. To provide world-class customer service, TowerJazz maintains two manufacturing facilities in Israel and one in the U.S. with additional capacity available in China through manufacturing partnerships.