Faraday and UMC Deliver 300 Million Gate 40nm Customer SoC

HSINCHU, Taiwan, Jan. 22, 2013 /PRNewswire/ -- Faraday Technology Corporation (TWSE: 3035), a leading ASIC and silicon IP provider, and United Microelectronics Corporation (NYSE: UMC; TWSE: 2303) ("UMC"), a leading global semiconductor foundry, today announced that they have produced customer system-on-chip (SoC) ICs with a density of over 300 million gates. The successful fabrication of the communication infrastructure ICs demonstrates the two companies' ability to deliver highly complex SoCs for third-party customers with lower development risk, design effort, and overall time-to-market.

The 300 million gate-count IC was built on UMC's volume production 40nm process. It will enable tremendous bandwidth for advanced communication applications that require consistently high throughput capabilities. By comparison, a standard USB 3.0 IC controller chip has 12 million gates. The much more complex chips integrate over 100 types of IP into the design, and feature an extra large 100MB SRAM size to power next generation communication products.

"Typically, this kind of complex IC requires enormous time and engineering resources to come to fruition," said Roger Cheng, vice president of ASIC Business at Faraday. "Working closely with UMC and our customer, we were able to leverage Faraday's strong know-how in IP development, abundant IP pool, efficient SoC design platform, and long-term familiarity with the foundry process to quickly expedite the delivery of this SoC. We look forward to bringing this product to high volume for our customer in the coming months."

S.C. Chien, vice president of Advanced Technology Development division at UMC, said: "With a design partner with proven SoC capabilities such as Faraday, customers can leverage the UMC-Faraday team to realize their complex SoC needs as demonstrated by the success of this 300 million gate-count IC. These large die-size SoCs are nearly four times the size of normal ICs, demonstrating the high complexity involved in its design. UMC's ability to rapidly bring these sophisticated SoCs from the design stage to manufacturing underscores our proven advanced technology and world-class manufacturing capabilities gained through over 30 years of semiconductor industry experience."

About Faraday

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading fables ASIC and silicon IP provider. The company's broad silicon IP portfolio includes I/O, Cell Library, Memory Compiler, ARM-compliant CPUs, DDRI/II/III, MPEG4, H.264, USB 2.0/3.0, 10/100 Ethernet, Serial ATA, and PCI Express, etc. Headquartered in Taiwan, Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S., Japan, Europe, and China. Faraday is listed in Taiwan Stock Exchange, ticker 3035. For more information, please visit: www.faraday-tech.com

About UMC

UMC (NYSE: UMC, TWSE: 2303) is a leading global semiconductor foundry that provides advanced technology and manufacturing for applications spanning every major sector of the IC industry. UMC's customer-driven foundry solutions allow chip designers to leverage the company's leading-edge processes, which include 28nm poly-SiON and gate-last High-K/Metal Gate technology, mixed signal/RFCMOS, and a wide range of specialty technologies. Production is supported through 10 wafer manufacturing facilities that include two advanced 300mm fabs; Fab 12A in Taiwan and Singapore-based Fab 12i. Fab 12A consists of Phases 1-4 which are in production for customer products down to 28nm. Construction is underway for Phases 5&6, with future plans for Phases 7&8. The company employs over 13,000 people worldwide and has offices in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Europe, and the United States. UMC can be found on the web at http://www.umc.com.

Note From UMC Concerning Forward-Looking Statements

Some of the statements in the foregoing announcement are forward looking within the meaning of the U.S. Federal Securities laws, including statements about future outsourcing, wafer capacity, technologies, business relationships and market conditions. Investors are cautioned that actual events and results could differ materially from these statements as a result of a variety of factors, including conditions in the overall semiconductor market and economy; acceptance and demand for products from UMC; and technological and development risks. Further information concerning these risks is included in UMC's filings with the U.S. SEC, including on Form F-1, F-3, F-6 and 20-F, each as amended.

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