Oki Semiconductor Accelerates its ASIC Product Offerings to Customers Through Its Growing Partnership with UMC


Alliance Cuts Time to Market in Half and Provides North American Customers Access to a Wide Selection of IPs

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Sunnyvale, CA, March 10, 2003 — Oki Semiconductor, a leading technology partner for the new era of digital communications and convergence, today announced an extension of its partnership with world leading semiconductor foundry United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) as Oki formally joins UMC's Gold IP program and Design Plus partnership (see release, September 4, 2002). Using UMC's 0.15µm process, Oki Semiconductor can now make available for its North American customers the wide selection of IPs in UMC's Gold IP program along with Oki's significant IP offerings. Oki Semiconductor customers in North America will have access to a variety of IPs targeted for UMC's 0.15µm process, including licensed ARM^® microprocessor cores and Oki's µPLAT™ design platform, as well as all of the standard Gold IP offerings such as high performance ADCs and DACs, SERDES, and high-speed I/Os.

The Oki/UMC alliance further benefits Oki's customers by cutting the time to production to less than six months for development and release of a fully tested, production ready 0.15µm ASIC product (MG 74K/75K/76K), less than half of the industry norm of 12 - 18 months. This shortened time-to-production is achieved as a result of using UMC's proven 0.15µm manufacturing process which allows Oki to bypass the production ramp-up time and the learning curve typically needed during the transition to smaller geometries.

"Our business agreement delivers major benefits to Oki customers, such as a higher level of design and customer service, extensive IP libraries, and time to market advantages," said Shusaku Sumida, president and COO, Oki Semiconductor. "The Oki/UMC agreement will help us quickly bring our 0.15µm SOC products to production and enable us to better meet our customer's high-performance design requirements."

As a UMC Design Plus partner, Oki Semiconductor will provide its entire portfolio of strategic intellectual property for use in the foundry's Gold IP program, as well as gaining access for Oki to the other UMC Gold IP Partner offerings. This partnership allows Oki customers to reduce cost and time for their designs by using proven IP solutions with UMC's qualified silicon cores, which are already in volume production.

"We are very pleased to have Oki as a Gold IP Partner. Ever since our agreement was first announced in September 2002, we have had tremendous success working with Oki to qualify their IP cores to our process technology. Oki's porting of their IPs into our 0.15µm technology greatly enriches our Gold IP portfolio and offers customers designing 0.15µm ASIC products silicon-proven cores to help them seamlessly move from the design stage to volume production", said H. J. Wu, President, UMC.

As an added benefit of the foundry relationship, Oki plans to migrate to 0.13µm ASIC products within the next year. Oki Semiconductor specializes in ASIC products for the telecommunications, networking, and PC peripherals market segments.

Price and Availability

Pricing of Oki's 0.15µm ASIC in 676-pin FBGA is ~ $70.00 for a quantity of 10,000.

About UMC

UMC (NYSE: UMC, TSE: 2303) is a leading global semiconductor foundry that manufactures advanced process ICs for applications spanning every major sector of the semiconductor industry. UMC delivers cutting-edge foundry technologies that enable sophisticated system-on-chip (SOC) designs, including 0.13µm copper, embedded DRAM, and mixed signal/RFCMOS. UMC is also a leader in 300mm manufacturing; Fab 12A in Taiwan is currently in volume production for a variety of customer products, while the Singapore-based UMC joint venture with Infineon Technologies will begin pilot production later this year. UMC employs over 8,500 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.

About Gold IP™

UMC's Gold IP™ program provides a broad range of IP cores and standard cell libraries to UMC's customers through alliances with IP platform, design service, and EDA companies. The program leads the foundry industry in the hardening of analog and timing-critical or datapath-driven cores through its Silicon Shuttle multi-chip test-wafer program. Results are coded in the Gold IP catalog according to the core's maturity in UMC silicon (Bronze = Softcore or GDS2, Silver = Hardcore available and silicon verified, and Gold = Production). UMC utilizes the VSIA IP tagging standard in order to track and identify core usage.

About Oki Semiconductor

Building on Oki's century-long commitment to communications technologies and markets, Oki Semiconductor designs and markets a broad line of advanced integrated circuits for telecommunications, automotive, computer and consumer products. Oki's product lines include telecommunications, RF, speech synthesis, ASIC, micro controller, display drivers, and memory devices, offered in a variety of creative packages. Founded in 1977 and headquartered in Sunnyvale, Calif., Oki Semiconductor is a division of Oki America Inc., which is a subsidiary of Oki Electric Industry Co, Ltd. Oki has ISO-9000 and QS9000-certified manufacturing facilities in Japan and Thailand. Information on Oki Semiconductor and its products is available through its web site at: www.okisemi.com/us.

Gold IP™ is a trademark of United Microelectronics Corp. µPLAT™ is a registered trademark of Oki Electric Industry Co., Ltd. ARM^® is a registered trademark of ARM Ltd. All other trademarks and product names are the property of their respective owners.