San Jose-based Atmel Corp. designs, creates and sells microcontrollers chips that drive all sorts of electronics internally and by touch and memory devices. It also manufactures integrated circuits, flash memory, radio frequency and application-specific integrated circuits for a host of industries including consumer electronics, industrial networking and military products. Atmel’s chips make frequent appearances in familiar items like smartphones, energy meters and a variety of home appliances. More than 80 percent of its sales are international. The company employs approximately 5,000 employees and recorded full year 2012 revenue of $1.43 billion, down 21 percent from 2011 totals.
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Scott Wornow, 50, always wanted to be a business attorney with an international focus. He graduated from the University of Virginia in 1984 with a B.A. in economics and spent his junior year abroad at Cambridge University. He returned to Cambridge after graduation to complete a B.A. and Master of Laws, which allowed him to graduate from Harvard Law School in two years in 1988. “I was thinking about working internationally at that point,” he says. “I always had an intuitive sense that I wanted to be a lawyer.” He began his career as a corporate and M&A lawyer at New York-based Kramer Levin Naftalis & Frankel and then moved to Paul Hastings’ newly launched New York office as an associate in 1994 where he continued to focus on M&A and corporate finance work. He was elected a partner at Paul Hastings in 1997 and began doing high-yield finance and M&A work for cable and telecom and increasingly, technology companies.