Cypress Kentucky Development Center Celebrates 10th Anniversary.

LEXINGTON, Ky. -- Cypress Semiconductor Corporation's (NYSE:CY) Lexington, KY, development center today celebrates its 10th anniversary with a reception for employees and local business and civic leaders, including Mayor Jim Newberry.

Opened in June 1997, the development center at 325 West Main Street has become a pivotal location for advancing Cypress's chip design technology. It's also the place where many of the company's internal web-based project management and productivity tools are developed.

Cypress established its development center in Lexington when one of its senior engineers, Alan Hawse, made plans to move his family back home to Kentucky. Rather than losing this valued employee, the company gave him the opportunity to build a development center in his hometown. Hawse is now vice president and site manager at the development center, which currently has 38 employees.

One key reason for the development center's success has been its close relationship with local colleges and universities. For example, Joseph Elias, a principle technology development engineer at Cypress, has been teaching a course at the University of Kentucky on VLSI (Very Large Scale Integration) chip design each semester for the past several years. Cypress has hired 12 of his students, so far. Another employee, Scott Savage, who is a senior manager in the development center's Transistor and Interconnect Modeling group, teaches an undergraduate class in electromagnetics at the university. And Hawse, who has been lecturing at the university for ten years, sits on its steering committee, reviewing the Electrical Engineering Department curriculum.

"The local university system has played an important role in the success of Cypress's Kentucky development center," said Hawse. "This unique partnership gives students hands-on experience solving real-world design challenges, while producing engineers that have helped us to flourish over the past 10 years. It's a real win-win situation."

Cypress's Kentucky development center has three functional working groups. The Corporate Computer Aided Design Development group, established in 1997, helps specify design processes and best practices for Cypress's worldwide chip manufacturing operations. The Transistor and Interconnect Modeling Group, established in 2000, is the corporate owner of all fab simulation models used by Cypress design engineers worldwide. These "virtual prototyping" models allow engineers to simulate the functionality of a chip in a computer prior to investing in a hardware prototype -- a significant contribution, since an initial hardware prototype in the semiconductor industry usually costs more than $1 million. The third group, Design and Information Management Systems, which was formed in 1998, supports global web systems for Cypress and is responsible for developing numerous business continuity and productivity tools now used by the company, including the corporate goals system, the global meetings server and the Intranet.

About Cypress

Cypress delivers high-performance, mixed-signal, programmable solutions that provide customers with rapid time-to-market and exceptional system value. Cypress offerings include the PSoC([R]) Programmable System-on-Chip[TM], USB controllers, general-purpose programmable clocks and memories. Cypress also offers wired and wireless connectivity solutions ranging from its WirelessUSB[TM] radio system-on-chip, to West Bridge[TM] and EZ-USB([R])FX2LP controllers that enhance connectivity and performance in multimedia handsets. Cypress serves numerous markets including consumer, computation, data communications, automotive, industrial, and solar power. Cypress trades on the NYSE under the ticker symbol CY. Visit Cypress online at www.cypress.com.

Cypress and the Cypress logo, PSoC and EZ-USB are registered trademarks of Cypress Semiconductor Corporation. Programmable System-on-Chip, WirelessUSB and West Bridge are trademarks of Cypress Semiconductor Corp. All other trademarks are the property of their respective owners.