SAN JOSE, California, January 15 /PRNewswire/ --

- XMEGA Garners Award for Innovative Advancement in the 8/16-bit MCU Market

Atmel(R) Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) today announced its industry leading XMEGA(TM) microcontroller was awarded the 2008 Product of the Year by Electronic Products' Magazine. Since its introduction in early 2008, there have been over 400 design wins to validate this award.

The editors of Electronic Products -- a leading trade publication for electronic design engineers -- evaluated thousands of products launched in 2008. The winning products were selected on the basis of innovative design, significant advancement in technology or application and substantial achievement in price and performance. The XMEGA was awarded this prestigious honor due to its unique design features that provide unmatched high performance at very low power. This is accomplished through its proprietary event management circuitry that provides the highest speed-power ratio for today's 8/16-bit microcontrollers.

We thought the AVR(R) XMEGA processor was very innovative and, for many applications, brought the performance level of the 8-bit CPU up to an entirely new level, said Jim Harrison, editor of Electronic Products. In some cases, it raises system performance of the 8/16-bit microcontroller up to, or even superior to, 32-bit processors.

The 2008 Product of the Year Awards were announced in the January 2009 issue of Electronic Products with a cover feature and a brief description of each product. Additionally, the winning products appear on Electronic Products' website (http://www2.electronicproducts.com/productyear.aspx). 2008 marked the 33rd annual Electronic Products' Product of the Year Awards, which began recognizing the best products in the industry in 1977.

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.

(C) 2009 Atmel Corporation. All Rights Reserved. Atmel(R), logo and combinations thereof, and AVR(R) are registered trademarks, XMEGA(TM) is a trademark of Atmel Corporation or its subsidiaries. Other terms and product names may be trademarks of others.

Information:

For further information on XMEGA, visit http://www.atmel.com/products/AVR/default_xmega.asp

Press Contact: Helen Perlegos, Public Relations Tel: +1-408-487-2963, Email: helen.perlegos@atmel.com

Helen Perlegos, Public Relations of Atmel Corporation, +1-408-487-2963, helen.perlegos@atmel.com