New Avnet Design Services Organization Offers Customers Comprehensive Engineering and Technical Services

Business Wire, Sept 22, 1998

PHOENIX--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Sept. 22, 1998--Steve Church, president, Avnet Electronics Marketing Americas, today announced the technical and engineering services to be offered by the new organization, Avnet Design Services (ADS). Avnet Design Services, a business unit of Avnet Electronics Marketing, offers a suite of focused engineering/technical services for the electronic OEM (EOEM) design engineering community, as well as demand creation services for suppliers.

"Much like recent trends to outsource manufacturing and materials management over the past few years, now a trend toward outsourcing engineering talent and resources is beginning to emerge. Avnet Design Services was created to meet that demand with the best services and resources available from any distribution partner," said Lloyd Kaplan, executive vice president, Avnet Design Services.

"As our EOEM customers are forced to compete in a global environment, the pressure to develop and deliver products to market faster continues to increase," Kaplan added.

"The design and production cycles may be less than one year for many products, and as a result, engineers must increase their time to market for feature-rich competitive products. Avnet Design Services offers our customers an entire organization of engineering resources to assist them in designing their products and getting them to market."

Created to serve the engineering community including hardware designers, software engineers, systems designers and engineering management, Avnet Design Services include: Product Solutions

Backed by Avnet Electronics Marketing's broad line card, Avnet Design Services can present complete product solutions to the engineering community in an unbiased evaluation/comparison environment, including complete DSP solutions, low-voltage design solutions, and seamless solutions for programmable products. Engineering Services

Engineering services include writing code for a simple microcontroller, or a reference design, to complete turnkey product design or contract engineering services. ADS also offers engineering expertise including field applications engineers and the Avnet Technical Support Center -- a team of designers and development engineers who can answer questions on a variety of subjects including RF design, schematic review, programmable logic migration, component crossing and advocation. Custom Design Support

Custom design support ranges from consultation to complete outsource engineering. Services can be delivered for all ASIC and programmable products including SPLD, CPLD, FPGA and masked programmable products, through Avnet's ASIC or Customer Design Centers, and include supplier interface, design analysis, logic migration, pre-layout simulation, layout, post-layout simulation and timing analysis, production tooling, prototyping, conversion, testing and production. In addition, to develop and manage intellectual property (IP), ADS maintains their own standard design library and common design building blocks, and also has access to proprietary product from one of the broadest line cards in the industry. Real-Time Information

As product design cycles continue to increase and engineers are being asked to create more designs, information becomes even more critical. Avnet Design Services is committed to providing their customers real-time information, through Web resources including QuickSource(sm), an exclusive application that gives engineers access to over 100,000 datasheets and application notes, and the ability to purchase prototype quantities of product over the Web via credit card. In addition, they offer gateway pages to the top electronics suppliers' Web sites and access to all of the products and services of Avnet Electronics Marketing.

"With Avnet Design Services, our customers are able to shift valuable focus

and resources from managing time-to-market pressures back to their core competency -- developing innovative products," said Kaplan.

Avnet Electronics Marketing is an operating group of Avnet, Inc. (NYSE:AVT), a Fortune 500 company with annual sales exceeding $5.9 billion. Maintaining a sales presence in over 57 countries, Avnet markets, inventories and adds value to the products of the most prestigious electronic components and computer equipment manufacturers for industrial and military equipment customers worldwide. The Avnet Electronics Marketing home page is located at www.em.avnet.com.