Thief River Falls, Minnesota (USA) – March 2, 2010 – Electronic components distributor Digi-Key Corporation, recognized by design engineers as having the industry’s broadest selection of electronic components available for immediate shipment, today launched Digi-Key Tools XpressSM in partnership with Embedded Developer, LLC, the embedded industry’s leading semiconductor research and compare site. Digi-Key Tools Xpress provides embedded design engineers with a worldwide sales and distribution network for development tools.

Digi-Key Tools Xpress is the only development tool program in the industry that gives engineers the capability to compare tools based on features and performance before making a purchase. This comparison capability was developed by Embedded Developer and is modeled after its signature device-compare process.

Additionally, the Digi-Key Tools Xpress program provides embedded engineers with more purchasing options from Digi-Key’s extensive offering of embedded development tools. The program also allows engineers to minimize research time concerning tool options and availability and maximize design efficiency.

“Having access to the broadest array of development tools, emulators, debuggers and evaluation kits is critical to the design engineering community. The primary objective of the Digi-Key Tools Xpress program is to search out those innovative third parties and make their tools accessible to the engineers through Digi-Key and Embedded Developer,” said Digi-Key Vice President of Semiconductor Product Dave Doherty. “With Digi-Key’s breadth of embedded product and Embedded Developer’s compare capabilities, this program offers engineers the ability to find, compare and purchase the industry’s widest array of tools available for immediate shipment.”

“Digi-Key and Embedded Developer have been providing engineers with development tools for years,” said President of Embedded Developer Glenn ImObersteg. “It’s time for a program that allows engineers to make the same educated decisions about their development tools as they have been making for their devices. Every day thousands of engineers shave weeks off their device research time by using our search and compare engines to locate, evaluate, and compare their devices and purchase them through Digi-Key without leaving the site. This new program will allow us to extend those capabilities to development tools at that moment in time when engineers decide on the processor they are going to use.

“Digi-Key Tools Xpress is a new joint venture for Digi-Key and Embedded Developer,” said Digi-Key Vice President of e-Commerce Tony Harris. “We are confident the Digi-Key Tools Xpress site will be a valuable tool for embedded engineers and believe this program will help streamline and consolidate their design processes.”

About Digi-Key

As one of the world’s fastest growing distributors of electronic components, Digi-Key Corporation has earned its reputation as an industry leader through its total commitment to service and performance. Digi-Key is a full-service provider of both prototype/design and production quantities of electronic components, offering more than 1.5 million products from over 400 quality name-brand manufacturers. A testament to Digi-Key’s unparalleled commitment to service, North American design engineers have ranked Digi-Key #1 for Overall Performance for 18 consecutive years (EE Times Distribution Study/August 2009). Additional information and access to Digi-Key’s broad product offering is available at www.digikey.com.

About Embedded Developer

Embedded Developer, LLC is jointly owned and operated by Hearst Electronic Group and Convergence Promotions. More information is available at www.EmbeddedDeveloper.com.

Oslo, Norway, March 2nd, 2010 – Energy Micro, the energy friendly microcontroller company, has announced a range of entry-level devices for low power applications subject to stringent PCB space and product cost limitations. At a sub-Dollar price, the EFM32 ‘Tiny Gecko’ (TG) microcontrollers offer the energy-efficient performance of the company’s bigger Gecko products combined with smaller Flash and RAM combinations and a choice of space saving QFN20, QFN32 and QFN64 packaging.

Engineered around the energy-efficient ARM® Cortex™-M3 architecture, the 32-bit Gecko products use less than a quarter of the energy needed by alternative 8-, 16- or 32-bit microcontrollers. Their current consumption is extremely low: in active mode typically 180µA per MHz executing code from Flash, 900nA in deep sleep mode and 20nA in shut off mode. In application benchmark tests, this low current performance, combined with a wake-up time of under 2µs has enabled the EFM32 Gecko microcontrollers to extend battery cell life by a factor of at least four.

The smallest and lowest cost Tiny Gecko microcontrollers, the QFN20 packaged EFM32TG100 devices, provide Flash and RAM capacities of respectively 4 to 32KB and 1 to 4KB and 12 GPIO. To simplify application scaling, the QFN32 packaged TG200 and QFN64 packaged TG230 and TG840 are also pin-compatible with the bigger Gecko family of products and provide Flash options of 8, 16 and 32KB and either 2 or 4KB of RAM and 24 or 56 GPIO.

To help further reduce overall system cost, the Tiny Gecko products offer the same energy saving features and most of the peripherals of the larger Gecko products. At the top of the range, the TG840 devices embed a 4×24 segment LCD controller consuming less than 900nA, while all TG parts offer an AES encryption / decryption engine as standard, a pre-requisite for many wireless applications.

Other peripherals provided by Tiny Gecko include low energy UART and I2C serial interfaces, A/D and D/A converters and a host of counters and timers. Unique to the Gecko microcontroller, its ‘peripheral reflex system’ running in parallel with the standard 32-bit ARM bus allows peripherals to run and communicate autonomously while the CPU is turned off, resulting in longer sleep periods and large savings in energy consumption.

Thirteen EFM32 Tiny Gecko microcontrollers will begin sampling in Q3 2010 and enter full production during Q4 2010. Pricing starts at $0.99 USD each in 100 K quantities. For further information visit: www.energymicro.com

As the QFN32 and QFN64 Tiny Gecko microcontrollers are pin and software compatible with the larger Gecko microcontrollers, developers can begin development using Gecko and migrate to Tiny Gecko when the parts become available. Later in the year Energy Micro will also announce a new low energy Gecko microcontroller family, offering higher memory capacities and new features including USB connectivity.

About Energy Micro

Energy Micro develops, markets and sells the world’s most energy friendly microcontrollers, based on the industry leading ARM® Cortex™-M3 32-bit architecture. The company was founded in 2007 by experienced semiconductor professionals with previous expertise from Chipcon, Texas Instruments, Atmel and Nordic Semiconductor. More information on Energy Micro is available at www.energymicro.com