NATIONAL SEMICONDUCTOR ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT WITH IAR SYSTEMS TO DEVELOP EMBEDDED WORKBENCH C-COMPILER FOR COP8 MICROCONTROLLER FAMILY

June 22, 1998 - National Semiconductor Corporation® and IAR Systems of Sweden today announced that the two companies have agreed to offer a complete C-compiler tool set developed by IAR for programming and debugging National's COP8 family of microcontrollers. With the addition of IAR's "Embedded Workbench," a highly integrated, Windows-based environment, National rounds out its microcontroller development tool portfolio with a world class offering that is rapidly becoming an industry standard. Final product release of the software is slated for November, 1998, with beta site releases scheduled for August of this year.

"With the addition of IAR's 'Embedded Workbench', National will greatly strengthen its COP8 development tool portfolio," noted Vittal Srimushnam, vice president of National's Microcontroller Division. "As one of the industry's most user-friendly development environments, 'Embedded Workbench' has the capability to greatly accelerate time to production and profitability. With this new C-compiler, developers will be able to write and verify their code in just hours."

"COP8 users will feel at home in an integrated development environment," added Andreas Molin, product marketing manager of IAR Systems. "Small or intermediate project developers, many of whom are typical COP8 developers, should be able to focus on the application without having to spend a lot of time learning new development tools," he said.

The IAR COP8 development tool kit will include a COP8-optimized ANSI C-compiler, an assembler, a linker, run-time libraries and a versatile C-SPY high-level language debugger. The C-compiler will be trimmed to produce optimized and efficient code. The compiler will follow the ANSI standard, but will also be enhance with many chip-specific language extensions to improve embedded development capabilities.

IAR's software tools will support all of the current COP8 hardware debugging tools from MetaLink. These include the iceMASTER emulator (IM-400), the programming facilities of the Debug Module (DM), and the Evaluation Programming Unit (EPU).

For more information on National's broad portfolio of COP8 products please visit our World Wide Web site at http://www.national.com/cop8, or contact Customer Response Center at (800) 272-9959.

National Semiconductor Corporation produces system on-a-chip silicon solutions for the information highway, based on its leadership in analog and mixed signal technologies. National is headquartered in Santa Clara, California, and focuses on the communications, personal systems and consumer markets. National has annual sales of approximately $2.5 billion and 13,000 employees worldwide. Additional company and product information is available on the World Wide Web at www.national.com.

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