SUNNYVALE, Calif., October 18, 1999 - UMC Group and Xilinx Inc., (NASDAQ:XLNX), today announced that their joint development efforts have led to the production and shipment of the industry's first 0.18 micron FPGAs. The two companies aligned to deliver the Virtex-E FPGA family, including a two million-gate device with 150 million transistors, available now, supporting multiple gigabit per second I/O bandwidth and 266 MHz double data rate memory performance. The XCV3200E three million gate FPGA will be available in 2Q00.

Jim Ballingall, vice president of worldwide marketing at UMC Group noted, "Xilinx has clearly demonstrated its leadership position in the FPGA industry with the delivery of its next generation Virtex family. We are extremely happy to have contributed to this success. Our ability to become the first pure-play foundry to achieve full production for 0.25 micron, 0.22 micron and 0.18 micron technologies is due, in large part, to our close cooperation with fabless technology leaders like Xilinx. Our cooperation represents a common commitment to developing technology leadership as a competitive advantage."

"Our new Virtex-E family clearly meets the industry's requirements for high density and high performance FPGA devices. There are no comparable devices on the market," said Dennis Segers, senior vice president and general manager for the Xilinx High-end business unit. "We attribute the early availability of this new product family to our joint development efforts with UMC Group. UMC Group has been extremely responsive meeting the challenging design criteria of our Virtex-E products. Presently, their 0.18 micron technology delivers the performance and yields that we need to retain our competitive edge."

The aggressive development of the 0.18 micron process, currently among the most advanced in the world, demanded a very close working relationship between UMC Group and Xilinx. "With this unprecedented level of cooperation, Xilinx and UMC Group have forged a whole new pure-play foundry model that offers process technologies on par with leading-edge vertically integrated device manufacturers," continued Ballingal.

Segers added, "This leadership allows FPGA designers to have early access to the most advanced technology for low-power, high performance applications."

Xilinx recently announced the shipment of the initial members of its next generation Virtex-E FPGA family. Four family members are available including the new XCV2000E device, with two million system gates, supporting twice the system-gate density and 200 percent higher I/O performance of the original Xilinx Virtex FPGAs. The Virtex-E family will consist of 11 members, from 50,000 system gates to 3.2 million system gates within the second quarter next year. The new Virtex-E FPGAs deliver the performance and density attributes that were previously addressed only by ASIC solutions, which are required for emerging communications equipment such as OC-192 systems and DSP applications capable of handling more than 200 gigabits per second bandwidth.

Xilinx is the leading innovator of complete programmable logic solutions, including advanced integrated circuits, software design tools, predefined system functions delivered as cores, and unparalleled field engineering support. Founded in 1984 and headquartered in San Jose, Calif., Xilinx invented the field programmable gate array (FPGA) and fulfills more than half of the world demand for these devices today. Xilinx solutions enable customers to reduce significantly the time required to develop products for the computer, peripheral, telecommunications, networking, industrial control, instrumentation, high-reliability/military, and consumer markets. For more information, visit the Xilinx web site at www.xilinx.com.