SST BECOMES LEADING INDEPENDENT SUPPLIER OF FIRMWARE HUB DEVICES.

SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc.)(Nasdaq:SSTI) has announced that it has become the industry's largest independent supplier of Firmware Hub devices for Internet computing systems using Intel's 800 Series Hub Architecture chipsets. In Q4 2000, SST shipped over 10 million Firmware Hub flash memory units, thereby becoming the highest volume independent supplier of Firmware Hub devices, according to Alan Niebel, managing director of Web-Feet Research, a leading authority on flash memory market research. SST's SuperFlash-based application specific Firmware Hub flash memory family includes the SST49LF002A, a 2 Mbit device, the SST49LF003A, a 3 Mbit device, and the SST49LF004A, a 4 Mbit device. All of SST's Firmware Hub flash memory products incorporate the proprietary FWH interface protocol owned by Intel Corp. and are read-compatible to the Intel 82802 Firmware Hub product.

Intel was the sole producer of Firmware Hub devices until last year, when the company began licensing its FWH interface protocol to other flash memory vendors. Since becoming the first licensed provider of Firmware Hub devices for Intel's 800 Series Hub Architecture chipsets (SST's agreement with Intel was signed in March of 2000), SST has shipped over 15 million Firmware Hub flash memory devices.

"With Intel's support and the hard work and effort of our engineers, we were able to become the predominant supplier of Firmware Hub flash memory in less than three quarters into our Firmware Hub production," said Mike Briner, senior vice president of the Application Specific Product Group at SST. "The inherent advantages of our SuperFlash technology, including the uniform small sector architecture and high reliability, have allowed our Firmware Hub products to achieve such immediate recognition and adoption by customers in such a short period of time."

The Intel 82802 Firmware Hub is one of the chips in Intel's 800 Series (810, 810e, 815e, 815ep, 820, 840 and 850) Hub Architecture chipsets that optimizes the performance of computer systems based on Intel's microprocessors. By incorporating the Intel Hub Architecture, SST's Firmware Hub flash memory products are designed to complement Intel's 82801 chip, also known as the I/O Controller Hub (ICH), and other Hub devices in the Intel 800 series Hub Architecture chipsets.

SST also announced that in addition to supporting Intel PC chipsets, it is the first flash memory company in production with a family of BIOS flash solutions that support the industry standard LPC-bus interface. SST's new family of application specific LPC flash products are designed for use in systems with "legacy-free" or "ISA-free" chipsets made by chipset vendors such as VIA, SiS and others, to store system BIOS and embedded OS/application software in applications including PCs, game consoles, set-top boxes, thin-clients, servers, network boards and other embedded CPU applications (based on PowerPC, M-Core, ARM, MIPs, etc.). For more information see the press release titled, "SST Announces LPC-Bus Interface Flash Memory Support for Internet Computing Market," also announced recently.

SST's SuperFlash technology is a NOR type, split-gate cell architecture which uses a reliable thick-oxide process with fewer manufacturing steps resulting in a low-cost, nonvolatile memory solution with excellent data retention and higher reliability. The split-gate NOR SuperFlash architecture facilitates a simple and flexible design suitable for high performance, high reliability, small or medium sector size, in- or off-system programming and a variety of densities, all in a single CMOS-compatible technology.