Sun Signs China Agreement

BEIJING and SANTA CLARA, Calif. -- Sun Microsystems, Inc., (Nasdaq:JAVA) and the Ministry of Education (MOE) for the People's Republic of China today announced a three-year collaboration agreement designed to meet China's demand for cultivating integrated circuit (IC) engineering talent and industry development. The agreement is based on Sun's OpenSPARC(TM) program. MOE selected OpenSPARC because it is the fastest microprocessor in the world, and Sun is the only major processor vendor to freely offer its designs to the open source community. Both the OpenSPARC T1 and OpenSPARC T2 processor RTL (register transfer level) files can be downloaded at www.opensparc.net.

As a result of the agreement, the Chinese MOE can educate students on the latest processor innovations, including chip mulithreading (CMT) and software coding that take advantage of multithreading. Chinese universities that participate in the program will develop their own textbooks, workshops and labs programs; the Chinese MOE and Sun will jointly promote the best practice throughout China. Students will benefit from the curriculum, and because it is based on Sun's open architecture they are empowered to accelerate innovation on top of the OpenSPARC design.

"Today, we extend the OpenSPARC ecosystem to embrace the world's fastest growing technology community," said Jonathan Schwartz, president and CEO, Sun Microsystems. "This relationship gives The Peoples Republic of China access to the tools and the freedom to develop the intellectual property framework it needs to cultivate native microprocessors and microprocessor engineers, while opening a huge market for the OpenSPARC community. This is a launching point for similar relationships with economies and universities worldwide, and an unmistakable endorsement of Sun's open source approach to building opportunity across software, systems and microelectronics.”

Sun Microsystems Inc.