Exar Buys Infineon ON Unit

FREMONT, Calif. -- Exar Corporation (Nasdaq: EXAR) announced today that it has entered into a definitive agreement with Infineon Technologies North America Corp. in which Exar has agreed to acquire for cash a significant part of Infineon's Optical Networking(ON) Business Unit. The acquisition includes assets relating to the multi-rate TDM framer products, Fiber Channel over SONET/SDH, Resilient Packet Ring (RPR), as well as certain intellectual property for Data over SONET products. The transaction is expected to close shortly.

"This transaction reaffirms Exar's commitment to the communications market; especially to high growth sectors such as Multi-service aggregation and Data over SONET/SDH markets. We believe customers seeking highly integrated, proven silicon solutions for tomorrow's critical applications will significantly benefit from Exar's market-proven SONET/SDH product portfolio," stated Dr. Roubik Gregorian, President and CEO of Exar Corporation. "These additional capabilities significantly advance the current development activities related to Data over SONET/SDH framers, enhance collaborative engagements with strategic partners on a worldwide basis, and expand our product portfolio targeting ADM, DWDM, Multi-service and Optical Switch applications. We will continue to actively seek opportunities to augment our products and technologies which could accelerate our entry into new markets. Given our strong financial position we are able to take immediate advantage of such opportunities as they come to our attention," remarked Dr. Gregorian.

With this acquisition, Exar immediately expands its SONET/SDH product portfolio by adding industry leading products covering all data rates starting from OC-3/STM-1 to OC-192/STM-64 and supporting up to 40 Gbits/s of bandwidth or 80 Gbps full-duplex bandwidth. By leveraging its existing products and the new acquired products, Exar strengthens its offering for high-density multi-service SONET/SDH platforms as well as optical cross-connects and switches. With market leading devices such as the Cobra and Tethys, Exar's multi-rate framers enable significant flexibility in line card design coupled with substantial cost and power savings. With industry's highest level of integration in its class, these devices will enable equipment manufacturers to target high growth, next generation market segments without having to sacrifice legacy services provided today.

Exar Corp.