Micrel Licenses ARM Core To Offer Industry's Most Integrated Gateway Solution

SAN JOSE, CALIF. AND CAMBRIDGE, UK - Oct. 30, 2002 – Micrel Semiconductor (Nasdaq: MCRL), an industry leader in the design and manufacture of integrated circuits for the high-speed communications, power management and analog markets, and ARM [(LSE:ARM); (Nasdaq:ARMHY)], the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions, today announced that Micrel has licensed the ARM922T™ core. Micrel has utilized the core in an integrated high-performance small office/home office (SOHO) gateway solution, for SOHO and residential gateway, firewall, Virtual Private Network (VPN), wireless LAN and fiber-to-the-home Customer Premise Equipment (CPE) applications.

Micrel is the first company to successfully integrate 5-port Fast Ethernet transceivers, MACs, a switch controller and on-chip frame buffer memory with the high-performance ARM922T core, offering a fully-optimized solution for the SOHO gateway market.

"The fast-growing SOHO and home broadband gateway markets need highly-integrated SoC solutions that enable users to develop cost-competitive products," said Dr. Tian-I Liou, vice president and general manager for Micrel-Kendin Operation. "ARM's high performance technology and small silicon die sizeprovides headroom for value-added differentiations such as firewall, VPN or routing, yet is efficient and cost-sensitive for volume consumer networking products."

"ARM's low-power, high performance semiconductor design with wide industry acceptance is an ideal fit for Micrel-Kendin's SOHO networking applications," said John Rayfield, vice president, US Marketing, ARM. "The agreement with Micrel-Kendin, a leader in the SOHO networking market with shipments of more than 70 million Fast Ethernet ports, further strengthens both companies' positions in the competitive market for SOHO networking solutions."

Micrel will target applications including SOHO and residential gateway for broadband access sharing, firewall or VPN security appliance, and combo wireline and wireless LAN gateway.

Availability
The ARM922T core-based SOHO gateway solution is available now in production volumes. A turnkey reference design has been developed for gateway application, complete with firmware, kernel and application software support.

About ARM
ARM is the industry's leading provider of 16/32-bit embedded RISC microprocessor solutions. The company licenses its high-performance, low-cost, power-efficient RISC processors, peripherals and system-on-chip (SoC) designs to leading international electronics companies. ARM also provides comprehensive support required in developing a complete system. ARM's microprocessor cores are rapidly becoming a volume RISC standard in such markets as portable communications, hand-held computing, multimedia digital consumer and embedded solutions. More information on ARM is available at www.arm.com.

About Micrel Semiconductor
Micrel Semiconductor is a leading manufacturer of advanced, high performance communications, clock management, Ethernet router, switch and physical layer transceiver, mixed signal, analog and power ICs. These products include devices for fiber-optic telecommunications and networking, cellular telephones, servers, portable computer systems, computer peripherals, process control systems, consumer electronics and power supplies.

ARM is a registered trademark of ARM Limited. ARM922T is a trademark of ARM Limited. All other brands or product names are the property of their respective holders. "ARM" is used to represent ARM Holdings plc (LSE: ARM and Nasdaq: ARMHY); its operating company ARM Limited; and the regional subsidiaries ARM INC.; ARM KK; ARM Korea Ltd.; ARM Taiwan; ARM France SAS; and ARM China.

*All other brand or product names may be trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective companies.