Exar Buys Infineon Optical Networking Unit

FREMONT, Calif., April 8 -- Exar Corp., a Fremont, Calif., developer of analog and mixed-signal silicon technology for communications networks, has announced an agreement with Infineon Technologies North America Corp. to acquire, for cash, a "significant part" of Infineon's optical networking business unit. The acquisition includes assets relating to multirate TDM (time-division multiplexing) framer products, Fiber Channel over SONET/SDH, resilient packet ring and certain intellectual property for data-over-SONET products. The companies said the transaction is expected to close shortly.

Exar said the acquisition will enable it to immediately expand its SONET/SDH product portfolio by adding products covering all data rates, starting from OC-3/STM-1 to OC-192/STM-64 and supporting up to 40 Gbits/s of bandwidth or 80 Gb/s of full-duplex bandwidth. Roubik Gregorian, president and CEO of Exar, said, "This transaction reaffirms Exar's commitment to the communications market; especially to high-growth sectors such as multiservice aggregation and data-over-SONET/SDH markets. These additional capabilities significantly advance the current development activities related to Data over SONET/SDH framers, enhance collaborative engagements with strategic partners on a worldwide basis and expand our product portfolio targeting ADM, DWDM, multiservice and optical switch applications."

For more information, visit: www.exar.com