Atmel Announces Alliance With North Pole Engineering to Establish Minnesota-based FPGA Design Center.

SAN JOSE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 11, 1999--

North Pole to Provide Design Services, Technical Support

and Intellectual Property Cores

Atmel Corporation (Nasdaq:ATML) and North Pole Engineering of Minneapolis, Minnesota announced today the establishment of North Pole as a Design Center to provide design services and technical support for Atmel's FPGA customers. This partnership will enable North Pole to provide system level design services, FPGA design flow, intellectual property (IP) development and integration for Atmel FPGA customers.

Atmel's AT40K is a family of fully PCI-compliant, SRAM-based FPGAs with distributed 10ns programmable synchronous/asynchronous, dual port/single port SRAM, 8 global clocks, Cache Logic(R) ability (partially or fully reconfigurable on-the-fly, without loss of data), automatic component generators, and range in size from 5,000 to 50,000 usable gates. I/Os can be pin-locked and counts range from 128 to 384, and are available in industry standard packages including PLCC, PQFP, TQFP, VQFP, BGA and PGA, and support mixed 3V and 5V designs.

According to North Pole Engineering's president, Joe Meyer, "Atmel has emerged as a leader in the development of advanced FPGA architectures. Customers are looking for system level services to help them define new products that take advantage of Atmel's feature rich FPGA device offerings. We expect this alliance to be very successful for both companies. Atmel's innovative FPGA architectures fit perfectly with the types of functions that are most in demand in the high performance designs North Pole develops. For example, Atmel's distributed FreeRAM(TM) capability enables the design of multiple RAM structures without loss of logic and the architecture facilitates efficient implementation of high-speed DSP-type building blocks such as parallel multipliers and barrel shifters.

"The very low power offered by Atmel FPGAs will enable these devices to be designed into many types of portable applications. The combination of Atmel's FPGA design and North Pole's system level design service capabilities provide a very cost-effective, high performance solution which will be welcomed by our customers," Meyer concluded.

Joel Rosenberg, Atmel's FPGA product line director said, "North Pole's system-level expertise and customer base makes them the ideal firm to provide design support for Atmel's new AT40K series FPGA designs in the Minnesota market. This alliance will provide Atmel access to a team of engineers with system level design expertise who can support our customers in the analysis of `what to build' in addition to `how to build' new products. North Pole will provide valuable insight to Atmel for FPGA product planning and system-level integration products where Atmel's FPGAs are embedded with other Atmel IP cores; including microcontrollers, DSP, nonvolatile memory and ASIC." Rosenberg concluded by saying, "This unique level of support from North Pole will result in Atmel FPGAs being designed into leading edge computer, telecommunication, emulation and instrumentation products."

Headquartered in Minneapolis, Minnesota, North Pole Engineering specializes in digital design and software programming services. Providing a wide range of services from full turnkey designs to supplemental support for development projects, NPE's engineering staff averages more than 10 years of design experience. Trained in the latest FPGA, ASIC and embedded systems design techniques, the engineering staff's experience includes network routers, PC chipsets, graphics accelerators, embedded controllers, mainframe and super computer designs. Additional information on NPE can be found on the World Wide Web at www.NorthPoleEngineering.com, or by contacting Joe Meyer directly at [phone].

Founded in 1984, Atmel Corporation is headquartered in San Jose, California with principal manufacturing facilities in Colorado Springs, Colorado, Nantes and Rousset, France and Heilbronn, Germany. Atmel designs, develops, manufactures and markets on a worldwide basis semiconductors, including nonvolatile and embedded memory, logic, analog, microcontroller products and system-level integration (SLI) solutions using advanced CMOS, BiCMOS, BiPolar and SiGe process technologies.

Atmel product and financial information can be retrieved from its Fax-on-Demand service. In North America call 1-[phone]. Internationally from a fax phone, dial 1-[phone]. Requests may be sent via e-mail to [e-mail] or by visiting Atmel's website at www.atmel.com.

Atmel Corporation 1998. All rights reserved. Atmel, the Atmel logo and combinations thereof are trademarks of Atmel Corporation. Cache Logic and FreeRAM are trademarks of Atmel Corporation. Terms and product names in this document may be trademarks of others.