UMC Forms Strategic Partnership with Silicon7

UMC vice-chairman John Hsuan appointed to Silicon7 board of directors

Hsinchu, Taiwan, and Seoul, South Korea March 26, 2003 - UMC (NYSE: UMC), a world leading semiconductor foundry, and cutting edge memory design house, Silicon7, today announced the completion of a strategic investment to form a partnership aimed at providing advanced, cost-effective memory products for the growing mobile handset and communications markets. John Hsuan, vice-chairman of UMC, was also appointed to Silicon7's board of directors.

John Hsuan commented, "UMC is constantly evaluating promising companies to partner with and invest in for mutual growth. Silicon7 shows tremendous potential to become a major force in the pseudo SRAM and MCP (multi chip package) markets, particularly as it has a production proven line of innovative low-cost/low-power memory solutions. We are looking forward to the benefits that this strategic partnership is sure to bring."

UMC and Silicon7 have been cooperating for a number of years on the development and manufacturing of memory products that target the mobile communications market space. Silicon7's CompactCell SRAM products are in volume production at UMC and deliver the low cost, low power and high performance that are required by today's advanced mobile computing and portable communications devices.

"We are enthusiastic about our new strategic partnership with UMC which will make us a dominant market force in the pseudo SRAM market," said Woodward Yang, CEO of Silicon7. "With UMC's full financial, production and technical support, Silicon7 will become a virtual IDM and will be able to achieve the economies of scale to become the number one or two worldwide supplier of pseudo SRAM and low power DRAM to the technically demanding mobile handset market. This strategic partnership will allow us to forge long term business relationships with major handset manufacturers both by ensuring high capacity and high quality production needed by our customers and by providing the most innovative low cost/low power memory and embedded memory solutions based on advanced technology from UMC and Silicon7."

About Silicon7
Silicon7, a cutting edge DRAM design house, is a leading supplier of one-transistor pseudo SRAM which are targeted at mobile handset applications and are a direct replacement for traditional 6T asynchronous low power SRAM. Silicon7 has a full lineup of 4Mb, 8Mb, 16Mb and 32Mb pseudo SRAMs which are in mass production and available in discrete TFBGA packages and in multi-chip packages stacked with multibank NOR flash and logic ASICs. Higher density pseudo SRAM and ultra low power DRAM products with market leading performance are also in development and will be sampling soon.

NOTE 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, and technological and development risks.

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