SST Ramps Foundry Capacity to Meet Demand for Serial Flash in 2005 SST's Serial Flash Capacity is Expected to Exceed 150 Million Units SUNNYVALE, Calif., Feb. 1 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- SST (Silicon Storage Technology, Inc., Nasdaq: SSTI), a leader in flash memory technology, today announced plans to increase its foundry capacity in 2005 to meet the anticipated industry demand for serial flash devices. SST expects applications such as optical and hard disk drives, LCD monitors and LCD TVs to drive sales of its serial flash devices. SST also expects the use of micro drives, tiny hard disk drives commonly used in applications such as MP3 players, to also increase demand for serial flash devices. The company believes worldwide demand of serial flash devices in 2005 will exceed 500 million units. To meet this anticipated volume growth, SST will increase serial flash capacity in its world-class foundry partners including Grace Semiconductor, Seiko Epson and TSMC. With densities ranging from 512 Kb through 16 Mb, and with higher densities expected in its roadmap, SST offers the industry's broadest serial flash product offering and is well positioned to meet the industry's current and growing need for these devices. "For years now, SST has been driving the industry shift from parallel to serial flash and it appears a greater number of customers are migrating to the more advanced technology in order to utilize the reduction in board space, power consumption and system costs that serial flash provides," said Alan Niebel, CEO, Web-Feet Research. "My expectation is the adoption of serial flash will experience an order of magnitude increase next year. With this growth, SST and its feature-rich serial flash products will be an attractive option for customers looking to transition to serial flash, where SST is particularly strong." SST's serial flash product offering, the SST25VF family, is based on SST's self-aligned, split-gate SuperFlash CMOS technology and incorporates a four-wire, Serial Peripheral Interface (SPI). The devices use fewer pins to transfer data to and from a system CPU, thereby creating an overall reduction in chipset pin counts, board space, power consumption and cost. As an added benefit, SST's serial flash devices offer an Auto Address Increment (AAI) operation, a programming mode that decreases total flash memory programming time by up to 50 percent compared to single byte-programming modes. Apart from providing the industry's smallest die, lowest power consumption and lowest cost devices, all of SST's serial flash devices are featured in a variety of industry-standard packages, enabling customers to experience a seamless migration path as they move to higher densities. This packaging strategy makes SST's serial flash family an ideal solution in a variety of applications, including optical disk drives, LCD monitors and displays, hard disk drives, graphics cards and MP3 players. SST works with a diversified list of customers and partners who incorporate its serial flash technology to create competitive solutions, including Genesis Microchip and Mediatek. "We are pleased to see the expansion of SST's serial flash technology into a broader range of densities. We believe SST's increased product offering will enable our customers to offer competitive LCD monitor and LCD TV solutions by reducing their overall system costs," said Anders Frisk, executive vice president of Genesis Microchip. Alex Chen, sales and marketing director, Mediatek, added, "SST has been the primary supplier of parallel flash memory in the optical disk drives field for years, and we are pleased to see SST's product expansion into serial flash. SST's serial flash technology offers our customers the broadest capacity in the industry and features a small package size with low power consumption, allowing our customers to deliver highly competitive solutions compared to parallel flash." "We expect 2005 to be a watershed year for serial flash products and we believe SST is well positioned in this market," said Bing Yeh, president and CEO, SST. "We have experienced significant traction within the serial flash market over the past few years, and as we expect industry demand to increase, we feel we are in a position to meet our customers' requirements and provide them with the serial flash solution that best suits their density, capacity and cost needs." About SuperFlash Technology SST's SuperFlash technology is a NOR type, split-gate cell architecture which uses a reliable thick-oxide process with fewer manufacturing steps resulting in a low-cost, nonvolatile memory solution with excellent data retention and higher reliability. The split-gate NOR SuperFlash architecture facilitates a simple and flexible design suitable for high performance, high reliability, small or medium sector size, in- or off-system programming and a variety of densities, all in a single CMOS-compatible technology. About Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. Headquartered in Sunnyvale, California, SST designs, manufactures and markets a diversified range of nonvolatile memory solutions, based on proprietary, patented SuperFlash technology, for high volume applications in the digital consumer, networking, wireless communications and Internet computing markets. SST's product families include various densities of high functionality flash memory components, flash mass storage products and flash microcontrollers. SST also offers its SuperFlash technology for embedded applications through its world-class manufacturing partners and technology licensees including 1st Silicon (Malaysia) Sdn. Bhd., Grace Semiconductor Manufacturing Corporation (Grace), IBM, Motorola, Inc., Nanotech Corporation, National Semiconductor Corporation, NEC Corporation, Oki Electric Industry Co. Ltd., Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., SANYO Electric Co., Ltd., Seiko Epson Corp., Shanghai Hua Hong NEC Electronics Co., Ltd., Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. (TSMC), Toshiba Corporation, Vanguard International Semiconductor Corporation, and Winbond Electronics Corp. TSMC offers embedded SuperFlash under its trademark Emb-FLASH. Further information on SST can be found on the company's Web site at http://www.sst.com/ . Forward-Looking Statements Except for the historical information contained herein, this news release contains forward-looking statements regarding flash memory market conditions, the company's future financial performance, the performance of new products and the company's ability to bring new products to market that involve risks and uncertainties. These risks may include timely development, acceptance and pricing of new products, the terms and conditions associated with licensees' royalty payments, the impact of competitive products and pricing, and general economic conditions as they affect the company's customers, as well as other risks detailed from time to time in the company's SEC reports, including the Annual Report on Form 10-K for the year ended December 31, 2003 and on Form 10-Q for the quarter ended June 30, 2004. For more information about SST and the company's comprehensive list of product offerings, please call 1-888/SST-CHIP. Information can also be requested via email to or through SST's Web site at http://www.sst.com/. SST's head office is located at 1171 Sonora Court, Sunnyvale, Calif.; telephone: 408/735-9110; fax: 408/735-9036. The SST logo and SuperFlash are registered trademarks of Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. Emb-FLASH is a trademark of TSMC. All other trademarks or registered trademarks are the property of their respective holders. For More Information Contact: Sasha Afanasieff Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. 408/522-7310 Steve Gabriel Porter Novelli 408/369-1500 x627 DATASOURCE: Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. CONTACT: Sasha Afanasieff of Silicon Storage Technology, Inc., +1-408-522-7310 or ; or Steve Gabriel of Porter Novelli, +1-408-369-1500, ext. 627, or , for Silicon Storage Technology, Inc. Web site: http://www.sst.com/

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