Netlist Names Ron Nikel Vice President, Research And Development

IRVINE, Calif., Feb. 17 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ -- Netlist, Inc. (Nasdaq: NLST) today announced the appointment of veteran technology executive Ron Nikel as Vice President, Research and Development, effective immediately. In this position, Nikel will be responsible for overseeing Netlist's engineering team in the development of new products and intellectual property.

Nikel, 44, has more than 23 years of design engineering and product development experience, and will report directly to CEO C.K. Hong.

"Ron brings important expertise to Netlist in support of the Company's portfolio of highly differentiated memory solutions," Hong said. "Flawless execution is key to bringing value-added products to market. Ron has a proven track record of design, development and engineering execution. We welcome Ron to our executive management team."

Nikel joins Netlist from Global UniChip, San Jose, CA. Prior to Global UniChip, Nikel was with San Jose, CA-based MetaRAM, where he was the VP of Systems Engineering. The engineering team at MetaRAM, under Nikel's leadership, produced and validated high-performance memory solutions utilizing specialized ASICs. Nikel also brings over two decades of engineering expertise from Digital Equipment Corp, Silicon Graphics Inc, Sun Microsystems, and Synopsys in the areas of custom and cell development and high speed memory and connector technology.

Nikel received his bachelor's degree in electrical engineering from the University of Cincinnati.

About Netlist, Inc.

Netlist designs and manufactures high-performance memory subsystems for the server and high- performance computing and communications markets. The Company's memory subsystems are developed for applications in which high-speed, high-capacity memory, functionality, small form factor, and heat dissipation are key requirements. These applications include tower-servers, rack-mounted servers, blade servers, high-performance computing clusters, engineering workstations, and telecommunication equipment. Netlist maintains its headquarters in Irvine, California with manufacturing facilities in Suzhou, China.

Safe Harbor Statement

This news release contains forward-looking statements regarding future events and the future performance of Netlist and its products, including future opportunities and growth for the Company's business. These forward-looking statements involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those expected or projected. These risks and uncertainties include, but are not limited to, the rapidly-changing nature of technology; risks associated with intellectual property; risks associated with new product development; volatility in the pricing of DRAM ICs and NAND;changes in and uncertainty of customer acceptance of and demand for the Company's existing products and products under development, including uncertainty of and/or delays in product orders and product qualifications; delays in the Company's and its customers' product releases and development; introductions of new products by competitors; changes in end-user demand for technology solutions; the Company's ability to attract and retain skilled personnel; the Company's reliance on suppliers of critical components; fluctuations in the market price of evolving industry standards; and the political and regulatory environment in the People's Republic of China. Other risks and uncertainties are described in the Company's annual report on Form 10-K, dated March 30, 2009, and subsequent filings with the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission made by the Company from time to time. Netlist undertakes no obligation to publicly update or revise any forward-looking statements, whether as a result of new information, future events or otherwise.

SOURCE Netlist, Inc.