SAN DIEGO -- Peregrine Semiconductor Corporation, a leading developer of high performance integrated circuits for the optical and wireless communications markets, today announced that it has completed construction of its clean room upgrade to enable the fabrication of 0.25 micron (0.25 um) integrated circuits in its Australian fab. Peregrine Semiconductor Australia Pty. Limited (PSA), based at the Olympic Games site in Homebush, NSW, Australia, has built a class one clean room to operate state-of-the-art equipment capable of 0.25um production with a roadmap to 0.13um production. Process development is well underway and designs will start by the end of 2001. This $18 million development will result in a major advance in technology taking Peregrine beyond the current 0.5um production and leveraging its patented Ultra-Thin-Silicon on Sapphire (UTSi(R)) CMOS. Peregrine's UTSi CMOS is a manufacturing process that uses a thin layer of silicon on an insulating and clear sapphire substrate to enhance the performance of the CMOS process by as much as two generations of process geometry reduction. This patented version of CMOS silicon-on-insulator (SOI) produces UTSi circuits that compete in the rapidly expanding wireless and fiber optic markets at higher frequencies and data rates with lower power consumption than standard bulk CMOS, SiGe and GaAs circuits, while still using standard CMOS equipment and processing. Peregrine Semiconductor Corp.