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ANTA CLARA, Calif. and HSINCHU, Taiwan, Jan. 15, 2003 - Numerical Technologies, Inc. (Nasdaq: NMTC) the world's leading provider of subwavelength lithography-enabling technology to the global semiconductor industry, and UMC (NYSE: UMC), a world-leading semiconductor foundry, today announced that UMC has extended its agreement to license Numerical's phase-shifting technology as the foundry migrates to the 90-nm process generation. The three-year agreement takes effect immediately, providing a seamless continuation of a licensing partnership that first began in December 2000. The companies will continue their ongoing collaboration for technology development to facilitate production of sub-100-nm integrated circuits (ICs), which began in early 1999.
"Our partnership with Numerical has been mutually beneficial in overcoming the challenges of producing subwavelength ICs," stated C. T. Lee, PhD, vice president of UMC. "By extending our agreement, we set the stage to continue our close cooperation for development of 90-nm and below technologies. We anticipate that Numerical's phase-shifting technology will provide tremendous value to our customers that are developing high-performance and low-power ICs on our most advanced process."
UMC's 90-nm process is expected to begin pilot production in Q2 of this year. The foundry, which is already working with customers such as Xilinx on 90-nm test chips (see http://www.umc.com/english/news/20021216.asp), continues to evaluate and invest in technologies that will help speed the introduction of next-generation processes.
"Numerical is committed to delivering to UMC-a visionary in the foundry industry-the most advanced technology available to get its customers' chips completed in the shortest turnaround time and most cost-effective manner possible," said Atul Sharan, Numerical's senior vice president of marketing and worldwide sales. "This license extension agreement highlights the strength of our long-term partnership. Our close cooperation over the past two years has been very beneficial for our technology development, and we look forward to closely supporting UMC and its customers as they move to sub-100-nm production."
Numerical's phase shifting is the only commercially available strong phase-shifting technology that is currently used in IC production. It has been employed to fabricate transistors as small as 9 nm in a research environment-the world's most miniscule transistors manufactured with 248-nm lithography equipment. In addition to licensing its phase-shifting technology, UMC also plans to deploy Numerical's Virtual Stepper® mask qualification software as part of its standard production flow.
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