Atmel and Barco Silex Announce Collaboration for Systems-on-Chip based on Atmel's AT91CAP Customizable Microcontroller

Extends Long-standing Collaboration for Customer Designs

Rousset, France -- September 11, 2007 -- Atmel® Corporation and Barco Silex, a subsidiary of the Barco group, announced today an extension of their long-standing collaboration to develop systems-on-chip for their mutual clients, based on Atmel’s CAP™ ARM®-based customizable microcontroller, with design expertise and European customer support from Barco Silex.

In terms of the agreement, Barco Silex will work together with clients to transform their design specifications into netlists for the metal programmable portion of the AT91CAP customizable microcontroller, incorporating IP blocks from Barco’s libraries of advanced signal processing functions as required. The netlists will be validated on the AT91CAP emulation board by mapping them onto the built-in FPGA, before being transferred to Atmel for placement & routing, and metal programming of the AT91CAP platform. Barco Silex will perform post-layout simulation prior to customer signoff for fabrication.

Michel Le Lan, Atmel’s Marketing Director for ASIC products, commented, “This agreement with Barco Silex builds on our successful track record of high-volume ASIC designs for numerous European clients. It extends our collaboration to medium-volume designs where the low NRE costs, fast design turnaround and affordable unit price of the CAP customizable microcontroller give us a competitive edge. We are confident that Barco Silex can provide a level of support that will ensure the success of these joint projects.”

“As a rep and distributor of ASICs, and as a design house with strong ARM expertise, we are glad to work with Atmel to give customers access to customizable microcontrollers at competitive NRE and unit cost,“ said Thierry Watteyne, General Manager of Barco Silex.

Atmel’s AT91CAP Customizable Microcontroller

Atmel's AT91CAP is an ARM® microcontroller-based system-on-chip with fast local memory, a wide range of industry-standard peripherals and interfaces, and a Metal Programmable (MP) Block that allows the designer to add custom logic. By combining the performance, density and low power consumption of the fixed portion of the device with the flexibility of the MP Block, CAP enables application-specific products to be developed in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost of standard-cell ASICs, but at a unit price close to that of standard cell devices. CAP also offers superior performance, smaller form factor and lower power consumption at a unit price significantly lower than an MCU-plus-FPGA combination for the same functionality. CAP is fully supported with an emulation board, software development tools, operating systems and code modules to facilitate application software development.

About Atmel

Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of microcontrollers, advanced logic, mixed-signal, nonvolatile memory and radio frequency (RF) components. Leveraging one of the industry's broadest intellectual property (IP) technology portfolios, Atmel is able to provide the electronics industry with complete system solutions focused on consumer, industrial, security, communications, computing and automotive markets.

About Barco Silex

Barco Silex, expert in micro-electronic design, belongs to the Barco group and has offices in Belgium and France. Barco Silex, which has been an ARM® ATAP partner for many years, offers a complete portfolio of high-end design services, from ASIC design, conversions, IP design (Memory Controllers, Encryption, JPEG, JPEG2000, etc.), to System-on-Chip development.

Barco, a global technology company, designs and develops visualization products for a variety of selected professional markets. Barco has its own facilities for Sales & Marketing, Customer Support, R&D and Manufacturing in Europe, North America and Asia Pacific. Barco (Euronext Brussels: BAR) is active in more than 90 countries with about 3800 employees worldwide. Barco posted sales of euro 751 million in 2006.

Atmel Product Information:

Atmel's AT91CAP product information may be retrieved at http://www.atmel.com/products/AT91CAP/

Barco Silex Product Information:

Barco Silex’s products and services are described at http://www.barco.com/designservices/