Rousset and Velizy, France, February 11, 2008 . . . Atmel® Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML), announced today that the recent Payment Card Industry (PCI) and EMV approvals of Thales' Artema S10 PIN Pad is the result of a long-term collaboration between the two companies. Thales' Artema S10 PIN pad, which combines high performance with high security, is powered by Atmel's AT91SO101, belonging to the AT91SO family of secure microcontrollers for highly secure systems such as card payment terminals.

The AT91SO101's embedded security mechanisms, designed to reach Common Criteria EAL4+ certification, were instrumental in obtaining Artema S10's PCI certification. In addition, approval was achieved with the AT91SO101's integrated smartcard interface which is already EMV pre-certified.

Olivier Moraillon, Product Manager at Thales e-Transactions stated, "These certifications are the result of a fruitful combination of Thales' innovative drive to provide high-end secure card payment solutions and Atmel's proven expertise in designing integrated, quick-processing high security products."

Olivier Debelleix, Atmel's Security Worldwide Tactical Marketing Manager commented, "Our AT91SO product for secure systems serves the needs of our customers for security and versatile communication interfaces. We are proud of Artema S10's EMV and PCI certifications. This shows that Atmel's expertise in integrated security is a plus when it comes to serving customers like Thales."

Atmel's AT91SO Family
Based on the ARM® 32-bit SecureCore™ SC100 CPU core, the AT91SO achieves an outstanding level of integration of a wide array of peripherals. They feature 256KB of EEPROM, 100KB of RAM and 32KB of ROM, cryptography engines to accelerate DES/TDES, AES, SHA-n, RSA, Elliptic Curves as well as many flexible interfaces such as USB, SPI, UARTs, GPIOs, magnetic strip and smart card interfaces.