Tsai (right) receives the Altera Platinum Certification award from George Papa (left), senior vice president, Worldwide Sales, Altera.

YL Tsai, technical manager, Arrow Asia/Pacific, Taiwan, has become the first Arrow employee to earn a Platinum Certification from Altera, a global provider of system-on-a-programmable-chip (SOPC) solutions. Tsai also is Altera's first Platinum Certified field application engineer (FAE) in the Asia Pacific region.

To become certified, FAEs must attend a specialized product-training course, pass an examination, complete a project report, conduct a specialized presentation and participate in a panel discussion led by Altera's senior technical and marketing personnel.

“With the Platinum Certification, I can approach all customers in my specialized area,” said Tsai. “In addition, I now have access to Altera's extensive marketing and technical resources, which can help Arrow to further strengthen its technical services.”

Altera's Platinum Certification helps promote the training and qualification of distribution FAEs on specific applications. Tsai's certification recognizes his expertise with Altera's Nios ® , a user-configurable, 16-bit instruction set architecture (ISA), general-purpose RISC embedded processor.

Arrow has two other FAEs dedicated to Altera who will pursue Platinum Certification in 2006.