Freiburg (Germany), and Hsinchu City (Taiwan), October 8, 2001 - Micronas, the Germany-based IC developer, today announced that it has chosen the world-leading semiconductor foundry, UMC (NYSE: UMC) for the production of its MDE 9500 IC, the industry's first hybrid analog/digital TV decoder. The MDE 9500 is the flagship of Micronas' mixed-signal decoder family and will use UMC's 0.18 micron technology to target the upcoming hybrid digital/analog TV market. Micronas is intending to utilize a host of UMC's advanced technology resources, including mixed-signal transistors and high-density memory solutions. In addition, UMC and Micronas are working on further leveraging embedded DRAM technology for a multi-dimensional approach to meet the demanding high-performance graphics generation requirements mandatory for Integrated Digital Television (IDTV) applications.
"We selected UMC as our foundry partner for the production of advanced ICs - such as the MDE 9500 - to target consumer markets," says Hans Schwendner, managing director Micronas Munich GmbH and vice president business operations of the Micronas group. "UMC gives us the advantage of high-quality processes with a range of supporting technologies in order to extend one IC product towards a family of integrated system solutions."
Felix Hu, vice-president of Europe Operations at UMC says, "All indicators point to tremendous market potential for emerging IDTV applications, and Micronas has shown its initiative to becoming a key player in this segment with the MDE 9500 chip. UMC is pleased to be able to play a significant part of this consumer movement toward Digital/Analog TV by providing the leading-edge technology necessary to drive these high-performance applications."
Cahners In-Stat Group predicts that the global market for digital TVs will reach over US$4 billion by 2004, up from $800 million in 2000.The MDE 9500 digital TV engine is targeting this market by enabling TV manufacturers to develop and build cost-effective digital TV sets for consumer applications while remaining backward-compatible to existing analog TV infrastructure. The introduction of the multimedia home platform (MHP) standard will further drive consumers to invest in interactive TV receivers - as long as they understand the stability and future security of their investment.
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