Actel Appoints Hamdy Senior Vice President Technology And Operations.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 30, 1996--Actel Corp. (NASDAQ:ACTL) today announced the appointment of Esmat Hamdy, as senior vice president Operations.

Dr. Hamdy also serves as the company's senior vice president of Technology. As Actel's third employee, Hamdy co-invented the technology that actualized today's multi-million dollar FPGA industry.

Under Hamdy's leadership, Actel's development team invented the first antifuse device that enabled the programming of both the internal connections and logic on a chip. The term "field programmable gate arrays" (FPGAs), was born of this accomplishment and later acknowledged and popularized by market research firm, Dataquest Corp.

Before co-founding Actel, Hamdy worked on DRAMs and the submicron technology that collaborated to produce the Intel 386 and subsequent microprocessors during a tenure at Intel Corp.

Hamdy began his career 1985 at Actel as a co-founder and manager of device development, responsible for the implementation of a device lab for development, characterization, and reliability-testing of transistors, design rules, process files and antifuse elements.

As director of technology development, he collaborated on Actel's invention of programmable interconnect antifuse technology which enabled the company to develop the first family of desktop configurable gate arrays.

A frequent contributing author, Hamdy has presented more than 30 papers and technical articles to IEEE conferences, many of which appeared in publication such as ISSCC Digest of Technical Papers, Electronic Device Letters, Electronics, Nikkei Microdevices, Electronic Engineering and J. Solid-State Circuits. He has also received 12 patents for his continuing advancement of antifuse FPGA technology.

While pursuing his doctorate degree in electrical engineering at the University of Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, Hamdy was the recipient of the Best Student Paper Award in the 1979 International Electron Device Meeting (IEDM), for his paper titled, "A Noval Single-Device-Well MOSFET Gate."

He also received his master's degree in applied science while at the University of Waterloo. Furthermore, Hamdy obtained his undergraduate and master's degrees in electrical engineering at the University of Cairo, Cairo, Egypt, where he received scholastic awards.

Hamdy is a board member for the Fabless Semiconductor Association, and a Senior Grade Member of the IEEE and has been nominated for the IEEE Fellow Grade.

About Actel

Actel is dedicated to providing the best programmable logic solutions, giving logic designers the capability and confidence to move to high complexity designs with success. The company is the world's leading supplier of antifuse-based field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs) and associated software development tools.

FPGAs are used by designers of communications, computer, medical, military/aerospace, industrial control, and other electronic systems to differentiate their products and get them to market faster. Actel introduced the first programmable systems-on-silicon, based on SRAM technology, which inaugurated a new class of PLDs: SPGAs or system programmable gate arrays.

Actel is traded on the NASDAQ National Market under the symbol ACTL and is located at 955 E. Arques Ave., Sunnyvale, CA 94086-4533. Telephone: [phone]. Internet: http://www.actel.com. -0-

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