SIPEX power management portfolio expands tenfold with the addition of ALPHA LINEAR power products

Billerica, MA - March 27, 2000 - Sipex Corporation (NASDAQ:SIPX), designer and manufacturer of high-performance analog semiconductors for the data communications market, today announced their expanded power management portfolio. With the addition of over 50 new Alpha linear power products, ranging from 10mA to 10A of output current, Sipex now offers target customers a complete analog solution for their Internet appliance and distributed power system applications.

"At over $1.5B, and growing at 15%+ annually, the linear regulator market is the largest segment of the power management IC marketplace," commented Steve Parks, President and COO for Sipex. "With the addition of Alpha Semiconductors' linear power products, Sipex now controls one of the broadest linear regulator product offerings in the industry."

Cyrus Seaver, founder of Alpha Semiconductor and now Senior Vice President of Sales and Marketing and Strategic New Business Development for Sipex, remarked, "Our semiconductor content in notebook applications has expanded to 8 analog functions, including linear regulators, voltage references, 3-volt RS-232 transceivers and a variety of leading edge single and dual electroluminescent display drivers. Alpha's strong position in the notebook marketplace, combined with Sipex's synergistic interface and display driver solutions, will create even more short-term business opportunities."

Tim Goodrow, Director of Marketing for Power Management Products at Sipex, indicated, "The Alpha power management products are very synergistic with Sipex, not only in technologies, but also in terms of our customer base. There is virtually no over-lap in product technology, the linear power products from Alpha complement what we currently offer."

The combined Sipex/Alpha portfolio of power management products now totals over 100 products. Low-power, high-efficiency charge pumps, ultra low dropout regulators, and micropower DC-DC buck and boost regulators provide state-of-the-art solutions for a variety of battery-operated handheld and portable products such as cellular phones, PDA's, and other internet-enabled devices.

Sipex also is focused on low-voltage distributed power solutions in networking and computing products where it already provides the proprietary multi-protocol interface transceivers, and microprocessor voltage monitors. A newly created Sipex Design Center, focused on developing breakthrough buck controller topologies, is creating the next generation distributed power solutions for servers, routers, hubs and other networking equipment.

About Sipex

SIPEX Corporation designs, manufactures and markets value-added, high-performance, analog integrated circuits using standard mixed-signal and dielectrically isolated BiCMOS wafer process technologies.

The company markets over 500 products in three core product areas: power management, interface and analog displays. The power management product group includes low drop out linear regulators, DC to DC switching regulators, PWM controllers, charge pumps, and microprocessor supervisors. The interface product group contains RS-232, RS-485 and high speed, differential transceivers, along with dual and multi-protocol transceivers. The analog display product group consists primarily of electroluminescent display drivers for backlighting small- to medium-sized LCD displays.

The company's common stock trades on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol "SIPX". The company is headquartered in Billerica, Massachusetts and has manufacturing facilities in Massachusetts and California.