Company Overview
Highlights
Manufactures and ships more than three million integrated circuits a day and more than one billion a year.
Manufacturing, engineering, and sales facilities in more than 60 countries.
Atmel Corporation designs and manufactures memory, programmable logic, and application-specific integrated circuits (ICs). The company is also a leader in the smart card industry, and in 1999, it purchased the Smart Information Transfer business from Motorola, which now accounts for a large percentage of Atmel’s sales. Atmel’s ICs are used in a variety of consumer electronics and communications systems, including cellular phones and base stations, networking switches and routers, and digital cameras and DVD players. Big clients include IBM, Nokia, Philips, and Siemens; more than 80 percent of its sales are from outside North America. Atmel made two big purchases in 2000, buying a Texas wafer fabrication plant from Hitachi and the semiconductor unit of French aerospace and defense company Thales Group. It also made plans to purchase a U.K. wafer manufacturing plant from Siemens. In 2001, however, Atmel suffered substantial sales losses and announced plans to close two manufacturing facilities, including the Hitachi plant in Texas it had just bought, as well as delay opening another and cut about 2,500 jobs (roughly a quarter of its workforce).