Fast-Chip and UMC Announce Industry's First OC-192 Services Processor

PolicyEdge Now in Production at UMC

SUNNYVALE, Calif.--(BUSINESS WIRE)--Jan. 7, 2002--Fast-Chip, Incorporated, a fabless semiconductor company dedicated to high-performance communications ICs, and one of the world's leading semiconductor foundries, UMC (NYSE:UMC - news), announced today that production has begun on PolicyEdge(TM), the industry's first OC-192 services processor.

Manufactured using UMC's 0.18 micron process technology, PolicyEdge delivers intelligent, high-performance classification, editing and statistics collection from 1 to 10 Gigabits per second. UMC's robust manufacturing process has produced better than expected yields from early wafers, allowing Fast-Chip to support two PolicyEdge speed grades for the emerging Metro services, IP router and multi-service switch markets.

Fu Tai Liou, senior vice president of worldwide marketing and sales at UMC said, "We are proud that our technology has helped enable Fast-Chip to achieve such a significant milestone in the development of merchant network processing products. Fast-Chip's advanced OC-192 design coupled with UMC's process technology allows PolicyEdge to achieve an impressive 10 Gbps line rate, demonstrating our industry leadership for a wide range of technology applications."

Featuring an industry-leading 700 Million Packet Operations per second in the base 100 MHz part, PolicyEdge sits in the data path between a framer and traffic manager. It can sustain 28 classification, editing and statistic operations on minimum size packets, while maintaining wire speed. PolicyEdge comes in PL3 for OC-48 or SPI-4 interface for OC-192 applications, supporting industry-standard glueless interfaces to other data path network devices. PolicyEdge is a single chip, cascadable device (no external memories required) that provides the industry's best cost, density and power metrics.

"Metro equipment vendors are showing incredible interest in PolicyEdge's capabilities, including mapping Transparent LAN services over MPLS -- destined to be our largest opportunity moving forward," said Gregg Cook, president and CEO of Fast-Chip. "Partnering with UMC on their production grade 0.18 micron technology has accelerated the delivery of the industry's first OC-192 processing ASSP to our customers. This partnership will also provide us with the enhanced scalability and performance in 2002 when we produce our next-generation chip using .13 micron geometries."

Fast-Chip utilized UMC's comprehensive fab services and support to develop PolicyEdge. In addition, Fast-Chip tapped UMC's Silicon Shuttle® Program to produce small lots of its services processor. This way, Fast-Chip was able to evaluate the PolicyEdge and ensure it met the requirements of its end users prior to committing to volume production.

Price and Availability

PolicyEdge is currently available in both OC-48 and OC-192 versions and is priced at $450 for the 100 Mhz version in 5,000 piece quantities.

About UMC

UMC (NYSE: UMC, TSE: 2303) is a world-leading semiconductor foundry that manufactures advanced process ICs for applications spanning every major sector of the semiconductor industry. UMC delivers the cutting-edge foundry technologies that enable sophisticated system-on-chip (SOC) designs, including 0.13-micron copper/low k, embedded DRAM, and mixed signal/RFCMOS. In addition, UMC is a leader in 300mm manufacturing with three 300mm fabs strategically located worldwide to serve our global customer base: Trecenti Technologies in Japan, Fab 12A in Taiwan, and UMCi in Singapore (completion in 2002). UMC employs over 8,500 people worldwide and has offices in Taiwan, Japan, Singapore, Europe, and the United States. UMC can be found on the web at http://www.umc.com.

About Fast-Chip

Fast-Chip, Incorporated is a privately held venture funded, fabless semiconductor company founded in 1998 that provides communication ICs for network equipment OEMs. Fast-Chip seeks to be the foremost provider of high performance processing solutions that enable the delivery of premium, value-added services for next generation networks. Investors include Morgan Stanley Dean Witter Venture Partners, Berkeley International Capital and Intel Capital.

Except for the historical information contained herein, the matters discussed in this press release may constitute forward-looking statements that involve risks and uncertainties that could cause actual results to differ materially from those projected.

Note to Editors: PolicyEdge(TM) is a trademark of Fast-Chip Incorporated. Silicon Shuttle is a registered trademark of UMC. All other brands or products are the trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners.

     Fast-Chip, Incorporated
     Craig Chidlow, 408/523-8060
     craig_chidlow@fast-chip.com
       or
     UMC
     Alex Hinnawi, (886) 2-2700-6999 ext. 6958
     Alex_Hinnawi@umc.com
       or
     KJ Communications for UMC
     Eileen Elam, 650/917-1488
     kjcome@cs.com