Premier Farnell and Exar sign global franchise agreement

FREMONT, USA & LONDON, UK: Premier Farnell plc (LSE: pfl), the leading multi-channel, high service distributor supporting millions of engineers and purchasing professionals worldwide, has signed a new global franchise agreement with Exar Corp., the company powering connectivity.

Based in Fremont, California, Exar is a technology leader providing highly-differentiated silicon solutions for the Interface, Power Management, Data Communications and Storage markets.

Under the agreement, Premier Farnell will stock a broad range of Exar's products, including transceivers and UARTs; power management ICs, LED drivers, LDO regulators, USBs; and communications products used in T/E Carrier and SONET/SDH applications, such as T1/E1 and T3/E3 framer combos, timing ICs, and transceivers.

"We are pleased to add Exar to our extensive semiconductor line card," said David Shen SVP and Global Head of eCommerce & Technical Marketing at Premier Farnell.

"Exar's broad array of power and communications products will be invaluable to our design engineering customers as they work with the latest technologies. Premier Farnell continues to invest in multi-dimensional technical support programs to ensure that electronic design engineers around the world receive the application information and support on the latest technologies and products from suppliers like Exar as quickly and effectively as possible.

"This investment provides designers with immediate access to our application and solutions information online, and the opportunity to collaborate with other designers on our leading community site, element14."

"Premier Farnell has extensive global market reach, a strong web presence and an excellent reputation for customer service, which we expect will provide new opportunities for Exar to expand our global customer base," said Paul Stafford, director of global channel sales, Exar.

"As a leading multi-channel high service distributor, Premier Farnell's focus on the design engineer community complements our current sales channels and will help accelerate the evaluation and adoption of Exar's products."