FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
SAN JOSE, Calif., November 30, 1998 – The United Silicon Inc. (USIC) wafer foundry in Taiwan, in which UMC Group and Xilinx (NASDAQ:XLNX) are equity partners, has successfully completed development of an advanced 0.22 micron process technology. The new one-poly, five-layer metal (1P/5M) dual-voltage process enabled the production of the new Xilinx Virtex series of field programmable gate arrays (FPGAs), including the industry's first million-gate, 75-million transistor device. Xilinx began sampling the million-gate Virtex FPGA in October and expects to begin production of all nine members of the Virtex product line in early 1999. The 0.22 micron process is a second-generation 0.25 micron technology from UMC Group. The manufacturing technology allows for significant die size reduction while maintaining the 2.5 volt operation. “Working with exceptional companies like Xilinx is a great technology driver for USIC and has challenged us to bring our process technology to the forefront of the semiconductor industry. We believe that UMC Group is currently the only dedicated foundry with significant production volumes at 0.25 micron, and the only one offering a 0.22 micron process,” said Frank Wen, president of USIC. “Our engineers continue to work closely with foundry partners such as Xilinx to meet their performance, yield, cost and time-to-market requirements.” “We've been extremely pleased with the progress made at USIC and with the technical prowess of UMC Group in general,” said Dennis Segers, vice president of FPGA development at Xilinx and general manager of the company's high end FPGA business unit. “In addition to the 0.22 micron process technology, the USIC foundry also has been in high volume production of the Xilinx XC4000XL FPGA devices since mid-year as a qualified second source. Working closely with UMC Group, we have quickly managed to achieve record defect densities with the 0.35 micron process that is used to make these devices.” About UMC Group
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