Winbond Offers Aggressive New Pricing For Its Text-to-Speech Processor

San Jose, CA, Feb. 18, 2003 - Winbond Electronics Corporation America, a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions to the consumer, computer, communications and electronics products markets, today announced that its WTS701 text-to-speech single chip processor is now being offered at $7.00 in 25K volume quantities. Separately, the Company also announced that the chip is now being offered in a female English language version (WTS701EF/T). The chip is also available featuring male English and female Mandarin speech.

"The market has reached an inflection point for adopting TTS technology," said Peter Himes, vice president marketing, Winbond America. "Winbond is at the forefront of TTS technology and, as a result, we have experienced a significant increase in design-in interest from all regions and markets. In order to extend our leadership role in this technology, and to encourage widespread use of TTS in everyday applications, we have moved the 25K volume quantity price point to $7.00."

The WTS701 is the industry's first single chip processor that converts Text-To-Speech (TTS). The WTS701 creates a more natural, realistic and pleasant sounding speech by converting text to speech using recorded human speech samples. This ensures that the output is a recognizable human voice, unlike computer-generated synthesis solutions. The chip uses a concatenation algorithm combined with Winbond's proprietary Multi-Level Storage (MLS) technology. It contains two memory arrays; one for the acoustic library and one for the processor program, enabling application-specific customization for special characters such as SMS icons or chat emoticons.

"In concert with the growing proliferation of text-to-speech technology, we found that a number of applications lend themselves to the use of a female voice, others a male voice," said Hezi Saar, TTS product manager, Winbond America. "By offering both male and female voice capability, manufacturers have more options than ever before for adding text-to-speech functionality to their products."

About Winbond

Winbond Electronics Corporation America, based in San Jose, California, is a wholly-owned subsidiary of Winbond Electronics Corporation, the largest branded IC Company in Taiwan and a leading supplier of semiconductor solutions worldwide. Winbond America designs, develops, markets and sells IC solutions to the global electronics marketplace. With a strong emphasis on mixed-signal solutions, Winbond America's primary mission is to serve the signal conditioning needs of computer, consumer and communications electronic manufacturers. Winbond Electronics Corporation has approximately 3,800 employees worldwide with design centers in Hsinchu, Taiwan; Shanghai, China; San Jose and Torrance, California; and Austin, Texas. The Company can be contacted via the web at http://winbond-usa.com for Winbond America, or through the corporate homepage at http://www.winbond.com.

Note: Winbond is a registered trademark of Winbond Electronics Corporation. All other trademarks mentioned herein are the property of their respective owners.