Oki Semiconductor Partners with Unique Technologies to Distribute Products Throughout North America

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April 22, 2002, Sunnyvale, Calif. — Oki Semiconductor, a leading technology partner for the new era of digital communications and convergence, today announced that it has entered into a franchise agreement with Unique Technologies to distribute Oki's products throughout North America. This new agreement will allow the two companies to better focus their sales and engineering efforts on the telecom and datacom markets, leverage mind share, increase field application engineering focus on Oki Semiconductor's telecom products, and help increase design wins.

"We're excited about the addition of Unique Technologies to our distribution network," said Michael Brown, vice president of sales for Oki Semiconductor. "Unique's limited supplier and demand creation approach to the market differentiates them from most in the industry. Their technical focus will allow Oki Semiconductor to drive designs in new, emerging and growth markets. Our partnership with Unique will enable us to further expand the distribution of our products to many of our key customers throughout North America.

The agreement between the two companies will enable Oki Semiconductor to immediately tap into Unique Technologies' existing marketing and sales distribution channels. In addition, Unique Technologies' design creation processes will provide Oki Semiconductor with new customer accounts, solution sales, FAE utilization, discovery and qualification. It will also include project identification and advocacy, project support, and a registration program for intellectual property/design processes.

Commenting on the new partnership, Phil Sansone, president and CEO for Unique Technologies said, "With products such as their 32-bit ARM-based MCUs, telecom ICs, speech ICs, DRAM and memory modules, Oki Semiconductor's devices enhance Unique's portfolio, providing us the opportunity to integrate these components with our other suppliers', creating innovative solutions that translate into expedited time-to-market for our customers."

About Unique Technologies

Unique Technologies is a member of The Memec Group, the world's leading distributor of advanced-technology semiconductors. With the merger of the Americas divisions of Unique and sister company Impact, Unique enhances its ability to provide its OEM customer base with vast product knowledge, design expertise and a team of highly trained field applications engineers that specializes in proprietary technologies and system-level solutions. When faced with critical time-to-market constraints, Unique analyzes customer design schedules, anticipates requirements and orders materials accordingly, ensuring successful product introduction. Unique also invests in technical resources and programs with high Return On Investment, which adds value to and creates demand for their suppliers' products.

Additional information about Unique Technologies can be found at www.unique-technologies.com.

About Oki Semiconductor

Building on Oki's century-long commitment to communications technologies and markets, Oki Semiconductor designs and markets a broad line of advanced integrated circuits for telecommunications, network, automotive, computer and consumer products. Oki's product lines include telecommunications, networking, speech synthesis, ASIC microcontroller, and memory devices, offered in a variety of creative packages. Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Oki Semiconductor is a division of Oki America Inc., which is a subsidiary of Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd. Oki has ISO-9000 certified manufacturing facilities in Japan and Thailand. Information on Oki Semiconductor and its products is available through its Web site at: www.okisemi.com/us.