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
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