Actel Slashes FPGA Prices; Announces New Price Structure for 1200XL and 3200DX Families.

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--March 3, 1997--Actel Corp. (NASDAQ:ACTL) today announced immediate price reductions of up to 40 percent and projected 1997 price reductions of up to 70 percent on the popular 1200XL and 3200DX Integrator FPGA (field programmable gate array) families.

The company announced it will begin shipping a new "F" Series variant of these products which offer an additional 30 percent savings. These new devices include all of the features and functionality of the standard products but operate at slightly reduced clock speeds.

"The new pricing structure, coupled with the fact that Actel was the fastest-growing publicly-held programmable logic company in 1996, emphatically states that antifuse-based FPGAs continue to be the price/performance leader for time-to-market sensitive applications," said Robert Nalesnik, Actel's director of product marketing.

"Our continuing market success has borne fruit in the form of significant price reductions on two of our most popular product lines," said Ken O'Neill, Integrator Series product line manager.

"We have substantially ramped production volumes, improved yields and reduced production costs. In addition, the new F Series is targeted directly at the most cost-critical programmable logic applications," O'Neill added.

Actel's announcement represents the latest in a series of technological and business developments that have made the company's FPGA products more attractive alternatives to traditional ASICs for high volume applications.

"There's no doubt that this round of price cuts on our Integrator Series device makes it attractive for designers to move more of their high-volume, time-critical designs from ASICs to programmable logic. The Integrator family, with pin-to-pin device compatibility from 2,500 to 40,000 gates, synthesis-friendly architecture and system-level features, is now priced as a more desirable ASIC alternative," O'Neill said.

New F Series Devices

Actel's new F Series devices will feature volume prices for the 1280XL and 32200DX of $13 (U.S.) and $47.60 (U.S.), respectively. Like all Actel FPGAs, the new F Series requires no supporting configuration devices and is functional at power-up, enabling faster, easier system design -- a critical issue in today's world of shrinking design-cycle times and product life-spans.

Following are current and projected price points, including the new F Series, which are designated by the addition of the letter "F" to the model number: -0-

Device           Time Frame  100 pc    Percent    High     Percent
                             Resale    Reduction  Volume   Reduction

A1280XL-PL84C    Current     $69.50     --        $39.50     --
                 March 1     $41.90     40%       $24.90     37%
                 4Q97        $29.70     57%       $18.50     53%
A1280XL-FPL84C   March 1     $28.90     58%       $17.40     56%
                 4Q97        $20.80     70%       $13.00     67%
A32200DX-PQ208C  Current    $338.10     --       $210.00     --
                 March 1    $252.00     25%      $139.00     34%
                  4Q97      $125.00     63%       $62.00     70%
A32200DX-FPQ208C March 1    $176.00     48%       $97.00     54%
                  4Q97       $87.50     74%       $47.60     77%

About Actel's Integrator Series

The highly efficient antifuse architecture makes Actel's Integrator Series, which includes the 1200XL and 3200DX families, attractive to sophisticated logic designers who seek to integrate complex logic integration and system logic into a single programmable device. With device utilization approaching 100 percent, the Integrator Series offers capacities comparable to 70,000 gate SRAM-based programmable devices. Such density makes the Integrator Series an optimal target for intellectual property cores such as Actel's CoreHDL products.

About Actel

Actel is dedicated to providing logic designers with the capability and confidence to successfully move to high complexity designs by supplying the best programmable logic devices and design software.

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

Note to Editors: Actel Corporation and the Actel logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Actel Corporation.

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