Nantes, France–November 19th, 2003-Atmel® Corporation (Nasdaq: ATML) announced today its partnership with OMNIKEY AG, to meet the PC market’s ever-growing demand for USB and PCMCIA smart card reader interfaces. To help customers reduce time-to-market, OMNIKEY and Atmel have worked in close cooperation to develop turn-key Integrated Circuits (ICs), firmware and associated drivers. Due to a high level of integration, Atmel ICs allow designers to develop their applications with few external components, thus minimizing the final Bill of Material (BOM). Compliant with ISO 7816, USB CCID, EMV 2000 and WHQL standards, these ICs offer faster smart card access enabling quick read and write operations. These ready-to-use solutions offer PC and keyboard manufacturers a unique opportunity to quickly and easily integrate EMV-certified smart card readers into their products, thus drastically reducing production costs.

The AT83C22OK and AT83C23OK are the pre-certified smart card reader solutions for USB links. They feature a USB 2.0 Full-speed host interface (12 Mbits per second) allowing for easy high speed data transfer. They are well suited for applications such as smart keyboards, dongles and USB stand-alone readers.

The AT83C25OK is the pre-certified smart card solution for PCMCIA links and is suitable for PC equipment, including PCMCIA smart card readers, notebooks, set top boxes and Personal Digital Assistants (PDA).

All Atmel single chip ICs featuring OMNIKEY firmware allow for any kind of smart card to be supported, including asynchronous and synchronous versions, in 1.8, 3 or 5 Volts.

“Co-operating with OMNIKEY allows us to offer ready-to-use, state-of-the-art solutions” says Manish Vadher, Atmel Marketing Director for C51 microcontrollers. “Our Customers will benefit from OMNIKEY’s long experience in smart card reader products.”

“These Atmel smart card reader ICs offer the best choice to build high-performance and certified smart card reader solutions at a competitive price” says Kurt Schmid, board member from OMNIKEY. “Many large keyboard and stand-alone reader OEM’s have already signed-up to use the Atmel / OMNIKEY solution.”

VQFP32 and PLCC28 packages are available for the AT83C23OK, and VQFP 64 for the AT83C22OK and the AT83C25OK; all products are available in industrial temperature range.

Production volumes are available now. Pricing for 10,000-unit quantity is $4.50 for the AT83C22OK; $3.80 for the AT83C23OK and $5.40 for the AT83C25OK.

Solutions for the smart card USB keyboard and PCMCIA smart card reader are ready for design-in through Atmel and OMNIKEY channels.

USB and PCMCIA smart card reader reference designs are available at $250 each. These pre-certified reference designs include boards, samples and complete documentation which makes Smart Card Reader development as simple as 1, 2, 3.