SAN JOSE, Calif., April 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, Ltd. (TWSE: 2330, NYSE: TSM) announced today at its 2010 Technology Symposium that it will skip the 22nm manufacturing process node and move directly to a 20nm technology. The move is value driven to make advanced technology a more viable alternative for its customers.

During his address to nearly 1,500 TSMC customers and third party alliances, Dr. Shang-yi Chiang, TSMC Senior Vice President, Research & Development, said that the move to 20nm creates a superior gate density and chip performance to cost ratio than a 22nm process technology and makes it a more viable platform for advanced technology designers. He also announced that TSMC is expected to enter 20nm risk production in the second half of 2012.  

The technology will be based on a planar process with enhanced high-K metal gate, novel strained silicon, and low-resistance copper Ultra-Low-K interconnects.  Dr. Chiang also indicated that the company has demonstrated record-setting feasibility of other transistor structures such as FinFET and high-mobility devices.

The technical rationale behind the move is based on the capability of innovative patterning technology and layout design methodologies required at these advanced technology nodes.

“We have reached a point in advanced technology development where we need to be actively concerned about the ROI of advanced technology. We also need to broaden our thinking beyond the process technology barriers that are inherent in every new node,” Dr. Chiang pointed out. “Collaborative and co-optimized innovation is required to overcome the technological and economic challenges.”

About TSMC

TSMC is the world’s largest dedicated semiconductor foundry, providing the industry’s leading process technology and the foundry’s largest portfolio of process-proven libraries, IPs, design tools and reference flows. The Company’s managed capacity in 2009 totaled 9.96 million (8-inch equivalent) wafers, including capacity from two advanced 12-inch GIGAFABs™, four eight-inch fabs, one six-inch fab, as well as TSMC’s wholly owned subsidiaries, WaferTech and TSMC China, and its joint venture fab, SSMC. TSMC is the first foundry to provide 40nm production capabilities. Its corporate headquarters are in Hsinchu, Taiwan. For more information about TSMC please visit http://www.tsmc.com.

SAN JOSE, Calif., April 13 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — Atmel® Corporation (NASDAQ:ATML) , a leader in microcontroller and touch solutions, today announced that it will be exhibiting at ESC Silicon Valley in San Jose, California, April 27-29, 2010. At the show, the company will be demonstrating a variety of Atmel solutions including:

• Microcontroller solutions. Highlighting a number of Atmel 8- and 32-bit AVR® solutions, the company will showcase a low-power audio application and several ZigBee® and consumer applications. Atmel will also highlight ARM®-based solutions, including a Cortex™-M3 microcontroller (MCU) with capacitive touch capability, an Android platform, a high-quality video playback device for industrial applications and a home display unit targeting the smart energy and smart grid markets. Atmel will demonstrate its AVR tools and its easy-to-use functions to debug complex designs. On the wireless MCU solution front, Atmel will be demonstrating an intuitive lighting control reference design platform based on its AVR ATmega128RFA1 microcontroller and introducing a new kit with IEEE 802.15.4-compliant solutions for the 700/800/900 MHz and 2.4 GHz ISM bands, combined with a BitCloud Profile Suite.
• Touch solutions. As a leading provider of capacitive touch technologies, Atmel will showcase its easy-to-use touch development platform for designing touch buttons, sliders and wheels. This platform demonstrates how designers can easily design highly differentiated user interfaces with Atmel touch technologies using QTouch® Suite development tools. In addition, Atmel will present its integrated touch software library and integrated support by CAD software tool, Altium Designer®, that offers designers unparalleled flexibility and time-to-market.

On Tuesday, April 27 at 1:30 pm PT, Atmel and Arrow Electronics will be announcing winners for their SMART Design Challenge at Atmel booth #816. The grand prize winner will receive a smart fortwo car. Second and third place winners will receive a 2.13GHz 13-inch White Apple® MacBook and HP Mini 1000 Mini Netbook, respectively.

Every 30 minutes, Atmel will be presenting a different topic to showcase how its products and tools can streamline a designer’s development timeline. These topics include:

• How Atmel AVR design tools can help engineers take their products quickly to market by using AVR microcontroller tools.
• Easily helping designers turn their design ideas into any audio solution using the Atmel UC3 microcontroller platform.
• Low-power features of the 32-bit AVR products to enable longer battery life and lower power consumption for a variety of applications.
• The Atmel Linux4SAM solution and how Linux developers can use a complete toolbox to build their ARM9™-MPU-based applications
• efficiently and with minimal time-to-market.
• A variety of other presentations on the Atmel easy-to-use capacitive touch and wireless Zigbee® solutions.

More Information

For more information about Atmel’s presence at ESC Silicon Valley 2010 and daily updates at the show, please visit: http://www.atmel.com/esc2010.

About Atmel

Atmel is a worldwide leader in the design and manufacture of capacitive touch solutions, 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.

AUSTIN, Texas, April 13, 2010 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — National Instruments (NASDAQ:NATI) today announced the availability of its 2010 Automated Test Outlook report, which shares findings of the company’s research into innovations and technologies shaping today’s test and measurement applications. The business and technology insights presented in the outlook apply across many industries including communications, aerospace and defense, semiconductor, automotive and consumer electronics. The goal of the 2010 Automated Test Outlook is to help engineers and managers gain further insight into the cross-industry trends impacting their organizations.

The extensive understanding of technology trends that National Instruments has gained through its interaction with companies across many sectors provides a unique vantage point on the direction of the test and measurement market. The 2010 Automated Test Outlook combines input from academic research, business intelligence, user surveys, online forums, customer advisory board feedback and field sales discussions. With this data as its foundation, the report builds a broad representation of the next generation of trends and methodologies addressing the business and technical challenges in test and measurement.

The 2010 Automated Test Outlook is organized into five categories: Business Strategy, Architectures, Computing, Software and I/O. Within each of the five categories, the report details a trend, methodology or technology impacting test and measurement. Topics that the 2010 report discusses are listed below:

• Standardization: Developing a common test platform reduces costs and increases reuse throughout the product life cycle
• Multichannel RF Test: Testing next-generation wireless devices requires a highly synchronized parallel test architecture from signal to software
• Peer-to-Peer Computing: Increasingly complex testing requirements require higher performance and point-to-point computing architectures
• Embedded Design and Test: Real-time test software helps engineers reuse tests alongside their embedded system models throughout the development process
• Reconfigurable Instruments: Field-programmable gate array (FPGA)-based instruments deliver a new level of performance and flexibility by facilitating reconfigurability down to the hardware

To view the 2010 Automated Test Outlook, readers can visit www.ni.com/ato.

About National Instruments

National Instruments (www.ni.com) is transforming the way engineers and scientists design, prototype and deploy systems for measurement, automation and embedded applications. NI empowers customers with off-the-shelf software such as NI LabVIEW and modular cost-effective hardware, and sells to a broad base of more than 30,000 different companies worldwide, with no one customer representing more than 3 percent of revenue and no one industry representing more than 15 percent of revenue. Headquartered in Austin, Texas, NI has more than 5,000 employees and direct operations in more than 40 countries. For the past 11 years, FORTUNE magazine has named NI one of the 100 best companies to work for in America. Readers can obtain investment information from the company’s investor relations department by calling (512) 683-5090, e-mailing nati@ni.com or visiting www.ni.com/nati.