Leading Smartcard Provider Again Adopts ARC For High Volume, Ultra High Security Applications

SAN JOSE, Calif. and ST. ALBANS, England, February 6, 2008 – ARC International (LSE: ARK) today announced that it has signed a new agreement with a major smartcard company that first licensed ARC’s configurable solutions in 2005.  High volume applications where smartcards are used include retailers, GSM phone providers, banks and airlines.  The new license enables the existing ARC customer access to multiple ARC products to create new solutions for smartcard-related access control and identification devices. 

“Being able to easily access medical, financial, legal, and multimedia content is a vital part of the end user experience,” commented Bill Jackson, ARC’s vice president of marketing.  “Smartcards represent another application where ARC is providing a solution unique from competitive offerings.  Our customer changed our IP to provide the consumer secure access to confidential personal information anytime and anywhere.  And with potentially millions of smartcards in circulation, our customer is assured that his custom design will be harder for thieves to compromise.  We are delighted that we have again been selected to help our customer address this growing market.” 

Smartcards are a natural target for hackers, and if compromised companies could lose millions of dollars in lost revenue due to product recalls.  ARC’s configurable solutions enable designers to customize the core and add custom extensions to create a proprietary design that is unique to the creator and extremely difficult to reverse engineer.  Similarly, ARC enables the smartcard designers to remove unwanted functions to create a very small solution which is vital to keep manufacturing costs down in high volume applications.

About ARC International plc

ARC International is the world leader in configurable multimedia subsystems and CPU/DSP processors. Used by over 140 companies worldwide, ARC's configurable solutions enable the creation of highly differentiated system-on-chips (SoCs) that ship in hundreds of millions of devices annually. ARC’s patented subsystems and cores are smaller, consume less power, and are less expensive to manufacture than competing products.