Atmel and Global Unichip Announce Collaboration for Systems-on-Chip based on Atmel's AT91CAP Customizable Microcontroller

San Jose, CA --September 21, 2009 -- Atmel® Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) and Global Unichip (GUC; TW: 3443), the leading fabless ASIC and SoC design foundry, announced today a collaboration to develop systems-on-chip for their mutual clients, with Atmel’s AT91CAP ARM®-based customizable microcontroller as the technology platform. Under the terms of the agreement Global Unichip will support customers by translating their designs into netlists for the metal-programmable portion of the CAP™. Netlists will be mapped onto a CAP emulation board for validation before being transferred to Atmel for place & route and metal programming.

With proven track record of accomplishing close to a hundred customer projects per year, GUC has distilled its experience into the most efficient design flow. By partnering with GUC, Atmel CAP customers will be guaranteed to get the most efficient service from the leader of fabless ASIC providers. 

Michel Le Lan, Atmel's Marketing Director for ASIC products, commented, “Global Unichip is a welcome addition to the growing CAP family of expert design centers and IP providers. Global Unichip’s depth of ASIC and SoC design expertise, coupled with its worldwide presence with a strong focus in China, will strengthen our penetration into this strategic region, to win and support new CAP clients.”

“As the leader of fabless ASIC designers, GUC has been striving to meet customers’ stringent demands for performance, cost and time to market with highest quality. Atmel’s CAP customizable microcontroller family is a perfect complementary solution to our cell-based ASIC solution. The CAP family is perfect to answer customer’s need to reduce risk and accelerate the time to market with lower upfront NRE in application segments with lower volume during the product life cycle”, said Keh-Ching Huang, Marketing Director of Global Unichip.

About CAP

Atmel's CAP is an ARM microcontroller-based system-on-chip platform 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. Atmel's AT91CAP product information may be retrieved at http://www.atmel.com/products/at91cap

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 Global Unichip Corp.

Global Unichip Corp. (GUC), a dedicated fabless ASIC provider based in Taiwan, was founded in 1998. GUC is now publicly traded on the Taiwan Stock Exchange under the symbol 3443 with 2008 revenue of 295MUSD. GUC provides total solutions from silicon-proven IPs to complex time-to-market SoC and SiP turnkey services. GUC is committed to providing the most advanced and best price-performance silicon solutions through close partnership with TSMC, GUC’s major shareholder, and other key packaging and testing powerhouses. With state of the art EDA tools, advanced methodologies, and experienced technical team, GUC ensures the highest quality and lowest risks to achieve first silicon success. GUC has established a global customer base throughout Greater China, Japan, Korea, North America, and Europe. Its track record in complex SoC/SiP designs has brought benefits to customers in time to revenue at the lowest risk. For more information, please visit http://www.globalunichip.com