Customers Can Now Utilize UMC's 130nm CMOS Process for the Production of Designs Featuring SH-4 32-bit Cores

HSINCHU TAIWAN, and SAN JOSE, Calif., - April 23, 2002 - UMC (NYSE: UMC) a world leading semiconductor foundry, and SuperH, Inc., a leading independent global IP provider that develops and licenses 32-bit and 64-bit RISC microprocessor cores for the open market, today announced that UMC is the first pureplay semiconductor foundry to offer SuperH?IP cores to the companies' mutual customers. The SH4-200 series, 32-bit RISC microprocessor cores designed for the open market are currently ready to be proven on UMC's 130nm process technology and are available to customers through the foundry's comprehensive Gold IP?program.

As a result of the agreement, semiconductor and system companies will have access to silicon verified SH-4 cores, through UMC, for use in system-on-chip integrated circuits. The process-optimized-fixed cores can also be easily combined with UMC's vast offering of compatible libraries and IP elements.

"SuperH SH-4 customers can now proceed quickly to market using UMC's renowned foundry expertise," said Rick Chapman, vice president of marketing and sales for SuperH, Inc. "This alliance with UMC also signifies broad market acceptance of the SuperH architecture."

The SH-4 RISC processor core has been designed into integrated circuits used in the automotive, digital consumer and residential gateway markets. The SH-4 core is widely supported by third-party hardware development tools, compiler chains and operating systems and features a 16-bit fixed length instruction set for excellent code efficiency. The 266 MHz SH-4 core features a powerful single- and double-precision IEEE754-compliant floating point unit (FPU). The FPU can make 4 single-precision vector/matrix calculations for superior handling of floating point signal processing algorithms and 3D graphics in gaming and car navigation applications.

Tai Sheng Feng, vice president and division director of Design Services for UMC said, "SuperH has demonstrated broad appeal for its microprocessor cores for a wide range of semiconductor markets. As such, we are pleased to offer this IP resource for our 130nm process technology to our mutual customers through our Gold IP program."

The SH4-200 series provides low-power, high-performance solutions in a range of price and performance options. Features of the SH4-200 series include:

- 2-way set associative 16KB instruction cache, 32KB operand cache
- Fully-associative TLB memory management unit
- SuperHyway Bus providing wide bandwidth with 2.1GB/s
- High-performance 2-way superscalar architecture
- High-density 16-bit instruction set
- Powerful 4-way FPU providing 1.9GFLOPS at 266 MHz
- Power consumption, less than 1mW/MHz at 266 MHz/1.2V

About SuperH, Inc.,
SuperH, Inc., was established as an independent company in 2001 following an agreement between STMicroelectronics and Hitachi to create an independently managed entity to develop processor cores for the open market.

The high-performance, low-cost power efficient SH-4 core, is targeted at the next generation digital consumer, automotive and telecommunications applications. Earlier this year SuperH released the SH5-100 series core expanding the portfolio of licensable IP offered by SuperH, Inc. In the future, SuperH, Inc. will develop all subsequent SuperH cores to the open market, including the development of the SH-6 and SH-7 cores.

The SuperH family of high-performance 32-bit and 64-bit RISC-based processor cores is ideally suited for applications that require a highly integrated system-on-chip solution that includes a powerful embedded processing engine and can run a wide variety of application software on industry-standard operating systems and middleware. SuperH processors are used in many fields including digital consumer products such as set-top boxes, and digital cameras and games platforms; factory automation systems and car information systems. Further information about SuperH products can be found on www.superh.com.

SuperH TM is a trade mark of Hitachi, Ltd.
Gold IP is a trademark of UMC. All other trademarks and registered trademarks are the property of their respective owners.