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."
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