NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR TO INVEST $600 MILLION AND ADD 450 JOBS TO ITS SOUTH PORTLAND, MAINE PLANT

SANTA CLARA CALIF., August 24, 1995 --- National Semiconductor announced it is investing $600 million to expand its South Portland, Maine manufacturing facility. The expansion will add 450 new jobs to the Western Avenue site, which presently employs 1,350 Maine residents.

The eight-inch wafer manufacturing plant is the culmination of a $1 billion investment commitment by National in state-of-the-art manufacturing facilities this year. Other commitments include $100 million in the Santa Clara Research and Development facility for an eight-inch line and $300 million in Arlington, Texas to expand the CMOS fab. Within these three areas, a total of 1,050 jobs will be added in the next 18 months.

The $600 million South Portland investment, one of the largest in Maine's history, marks the company's first commercial endeavor into eight-inch wafer manufacturing. It will add 40,000 square feet of "clean room" manufacturing area to the present 540,000 square foot site. The expanded facility will use eight-inch wafers in submicron CMOS (Complementary Metal Oxide Silicon) technology, which produces chips able to process information at higher speeds and lower power consumption than older technologies.

"The eight-inch expansion will enable us to provide more product to more customers in less time," said Laurenz Schmidt, managing director of National's South Portland facility. "This type of advanced, eight- inch technology gives us tremendous growth potential in an industry already on a steady upward course. Silicon is in so many products today, it's no longer a cyclical industry. With this expansion and our 1994 BiCMOS expansion, South Portland becomes an important factor in National's ability to grow at or beyond industry rates."

Schmidt said the work of state and community leaders contributed to the decision to locate the expansion in South Portland. "In our last expansion effort, we worked with the community to become a better partner and better neighbor," he said. "Today, that spirit of collaboration helped make this expansion a reality in Maine, thanks to the help of the Governor, the Maine Legislature, the City of South Portland and the Chamber of Commerce."

Factors that contributed to the company's decision to expand in Maine include the area's business climate, availability of a skilled labor force, a healthy utility infrastructure and reasonably priced housing, Schmidt added.

National plans to begin ground-breaking activities in late fall and expects to complete the facility in the summer of 1997.

Typical applications for submicron CMOS products to be produced at the South Portland facility include National's PLLatinum(tm) radio frequency synthesizers, which send radio- based, low-noise communication signals to wireless communications products such as cellular and cordless phones, broadcast satellites, global positioning systems and private mobile radios. National projects the wireless communication market's demand for semiconductors will grow from $1.5 billion in sales to $3.2 billion by the year 2000.

Semiconductor chips manufactured in the new facility will contain elements as small as one hundredths of the diameter of a human hair, or one quarter of a micron (0.25). The clean room required to manufacture such delicate devices free of defects is 10,000 times cleaner than a hospital operating room. The semiconductor chips will create and interconnect millions of transistors on a thin chip of silicon the size of a human fingernail.

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