Atmel Targets Future Automotive and Wireless Design Activity With Extension of Its Design Center in Dresden

HEILBRONN, Germany, July 14 -- Atmel(R) Corporation announced today that it has extended its Dresden Design Center by adding 32 new highly skilled engineers to the 12 designers who have been part of the Atmel team for the last 3 years. Atmel has also drastically increased the size of its location, and is building up a new laboratory.

"The addition of the new design engineers will enhance Atmel's ability to provide innovative, state-of-the-art integrated circuits at a competitive price. Atmel is very happy with the excellent support from Saxony. The Dresden region offers a strong base of skilled engineers, supported by excellent infrastructure and politics that encourage further investment into the region," says Bob McConnell, VP and General Manager of Atmel's RF and Automotive Business Unit. "A number of our customers and suppliers are located in and around the city of Dresden, and we will also both continue and create close cooperation with Saxonian companies working in our market areas," he continued.

Twenty-five engineers of the 32 recently hired will be used to design RF CMOS devices to enable Atmel to deliver even more cost-effective wireless devices, especially in the area of ZigBee, GPS and future wireless programs. The original group of 12 engineers has been augmented by 7 and will continue to design advanced circuits for automotive body electronics, utilizing Atmel's leading-edge silicon-on-insulator BCDMOS technologies.

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.

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