Atmel Standardizes on Denali's Behavioral Simulation Models for the In System Integration of Its Flash Memory Products

Atmel Joins Denali's Memory Vendor Partner (MVP) Program to Shorten Time to Market for Integrating Atmel Flash Memory in to System Designs

Palo Alto, Calif., December 18, 2002--- Atmel® Corporation (Nasdaq:ATML), a leading provider of system-level integration semiconductor solutions, and Denali Software Inc., the leader in memory system design and verification, announced today that Atmel Corporation has joined Denali's Memory Vendor Program. Under the terms of the agreement, Denali will develop and maintain models for all existing and future Atmel Flash devices, including stacked modules, DataFlash®, and parallel Flash. Atmel's Flash devices are used in numerous applications such as cellular phones, set top boxes, disk drives, DVD's and answering machines. The models will be developed using Denali's SOMA™ modeling technology, the de facto standard adopted by every major memory manufacturer worldwide.

Atmel will validate and certify the functionality of these models, which are available now through Denali at: ttp://www.eMemory.com/Atmel-FLASH. All updates, specification changes, bug fixes, etc., are automatically sent to Atmel customers. Now, designers have a single source for information, models, tools, and eventually memory controller intellectual property to drive these Flash memory chips.

Denali's Memory Modeler-Advanced Verification (MMAV) tool is the most powerful solution for modeling memory and verifying memory interfaces. The C-based MMAV architecture delivers high performance verification. It supports all memories from all vendors. It integrates seamlessly into all simulators including: Verilog, VHDL, C, and custom simulators, as well as all testbench tools including Specman Elite, VERA, and TestBuilder. Powerful verification features include load-save-compare memory images during simulation, transaction monitoring, back-door memory read and write operation, error injection routines, and callbacks on error detection. The quality of Denali's MMAV memory modeling solution is proven in silicon in thousands of commercial designs.

"Having Denali as our supplier of Flash memory models means our customer gets the benefit of Denali's continuous support to enhance and improve memory models, tool integration, and the eMemory infrastructure for model delivery and up-to-date change notification," says Anup Sidhu, Director, Flash memory marketing at Atmel. "We believe that these models will help shorten our customer's time to market. The result is everyone wins."

"Atmel entrusting Denali as the source of Flash memory models for its customer brings not only high praise but also the responsibility of ensuring Atmel customers get their design to market on time," says Denali's vice president of applications engineering, David Lin. "Since our founding in 1995, we have made it our goal to be the single-most trusted resource on memories for designers. Today, we have models for every memory device in the world, and thousands of engineers access these models and other design resources on eMemory.com. We are pleased with this agreement with Atmel, which marks another milestone in our quest."

About Atmel
Founded in 1984, Atmel Corporation is headquartered in San Jose, California with manufacturing facilities in North America and Europe. Atmel designs, manufactures and markets worldwide, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and RF semiconductors. Atmel is also a leading provider of system-level integration semiconductor solutions using CMOS, BiCMOS, SiGe, and high-voltage BCDMOS process technologies.

About Denali Software, Inc.
Denali Software, Inc. is the world's largest provider of semiconductor intellectual property (SIP) and engineering design automation (EDA) tools for memory system design and verification. Denali's eMemory.com™ houses the industry's largest database of memory component information, and provides an online infrastructure for memory selection, memory controller IP configuration, and memory model access. More than 400 companies worldwide use Denali's EDA tools, semiconductor IP, and memory market information services to plan and develop memory systems for communications, consumer, and computing products. For more information, please visit Denali at www.denali.com or contact Denali directly at: 650/461-7200, or email: info@denali.com

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Information: Atmel's product information may be retrieved at http://www.atmel.com/atmel/products