Exar Corporation Acquires Altior Inc. to Provide Additional Growth in Data Compression

Fremont, California, February 19, 2013 - Exar Corporation (Nasdaq: EXAR), a leading provider of high performance analog mixed-signal products and data management solutions, today announced that it will acquire the assets of Altior Inc., a privately held company in Eatontown, New Jersey.

The transaction, expected to close on March 22, 2013, includes $5.0 million in initial consideration to be paid in a combination of cash and stock and a three-year earn-out against net revenue contributed by Altior. The impact to the Company's guidance for the fourth quarter of fiscal year 2013 is expected to be immaterial.

Altior Inc. designs, develops and markets hardware and software compression solutions for use in big data applications. The company provides FPGA based PCIe cards and compression software that is transparent to the application and enables compression through a plug-and-play lightweight layered file system in the Linux kernel and POSIX compliant File Systems. The Altior AltraFlex family of products with CeDeFS software solution requires minimal integration and enables real-time Hadoop compression and remote replication with hardware acceleration. Storage requirements on each Data Node in a Hadoop Cluster can be reduced by as much as 50%, significantly reducing the Cluster total cost of ownership without impacting Data Analytics performance.

"Altior brings new customers and new use cases to the leading position Exar has established in data compression. The success of our data compression business is evident in the growth and profitability we have generated in the first three quarters of fiscal year 2013. Our strength in database compression with the DX1845 series compression cards will be complemented by the addition of Altior's layered file system translation and plug-and-play operation. The AltraFlex cards and CeDeFS software will expand our opportunity in big data and is expected to increase our penetration and growth in this vibrant market," commented Exar President and CEO Louis DiNardo. "The competency of the Altior team, especially in the area of system software, coupled with the hardware and software competency that we have demonstrated will enhance Exar's position as a leader in data management solutions," concluded Mr. DiNardo.

Ramana Jampala, CEO of Altior noted, "Exar has built a strong position and a growth business in big data management. Our CeDeFS technology enables compression integration into current applications seamlessly. The solution, when combined with the state-of-the-art Exar hardware compression acceleration, will reduce the disk space, storage I/O barrier, power consumption and overall system cost significantly," remarked Mr. Jampala.

About Exar

Exar Corporation designs, develops and markets high performance, analog mixed-signal integrated circuits and advanced sub-system solutions for the Networking & Storage, Industrial & Embedded Systems, and Communications Infrastructure markets. Exar's product portfolio includes power management and connectivity components, communications products, and network security and storage optimization solutions. Exar has locations worldwide providing real-time customer support. For more information about Exar, visit http://www.exar.com.

About Altior

Altior™ offers a broad range of industry-leading hardware and software solutions for the networking and storage markets. Altior products deliver high performance for increased throughput, significant energy savings, and effective network and storage optimization. Altior's platform solutions deliver realizable value to customers by enhancing system performance, reducing development time, and achieving faster time to market. For more information about Altior, visit http://www.altior.com.