ELAN Microelectronics Corporation is an IC designer and provider of 8-bit microcontrollers and PC Peripheral ICs. Situated at the Hsinchu Science Park, the Silicon Valley of Taiwan  (http://www.emc.com.tw)

Atmel Corporation (NASDAQ: ATML) is a manufacturer of semiconductors, founded in 1984. Its focus is on system-level solutions built around flashmicrocontrollers. Its products include microcontrollers (including 8051 derivatives and AT91SAM and AT91CAP ARM-based micros), and its own Atmel AVR and AVR32 architectures, radio frequency (RF) devices, EEPROM and Flash memory devices (including DataFlash-based memory), and a number of application-specific products. Atmel supplies its devices as standard products, ASICs, or ASSPs depending on the requirements of its customers. In some cases it is able to offer system on chip solutions.

Starting with AT89C51 by using assembly language to understand how the MCU works, that’s the way all student in Vietnam opens the door of the Embedded world!

As said above, you can understand how popular the Atmel chip is in Vietnam. Asking me? Yes, of course I used to start by the same way.

Some recent years, there’s some change on the position of Atmel in Vietnam, because of the fake products and the long lead-time, however, it is still a most popular chip in Vietnam.

I’m familiar with AT89C51 and AVR ATmega, however, ATTiny is the first one we used in the large number (some ten of thousands).

Known Atmel Singapore via Arrow, this would be the good chance to open the relationship with the most popular chip in Vietnam.

NXP Semiconductors N.V. (Nasdaq: NXPI) provides High Performance Mixed Signal and Standard Product solutions that leverage its leading RF, Analog, Power Management, Interface, Security and Digital Processing expertise. These innovations are used in a wide range of automotive, identification, wireless infrastructure, lighting, industrial, mobile, consumer and computing applications.

Using NXP’s MCU from the second year when studying at the University of Technology with the introduction from Mr. Kiem Huynh (Lecturer – the well-known coach in the Robot contest).

It would be the very good beginning, I quickly understood 8 bits MCU (LPC922, LPC932, P89V51Rx2), ARM7  MCU (LPC2000) and used them in some application when still being a student.

I connected Philips Semiconductors (Vietnam’s representative office) from 2004 and actually provided many support for them in the MCU contest 2nd and 3rd, with many useful information in my personal website.

I got their Certificated in the MCU contest 2005 and the Award for the contribution to the contest.

The interesting thing is, in the meeting with NXP’s team in June, 2010, I met Mr. Tan – Sales Director, who participated in the Celeration 5 years ago to give me the Award!  He was very supprised, and ofcourse, I was, too. The world is not big enough, huh?

We are now the good partner, not only with the NXP’s Singapore , but also the Vietnam office.

Doing business is just for doing business, but friends are the friends, aren’t you?