Faraday and UMC deliver 300 million gate 40nm customer SoC

TAIWAN: Faraday Technology Corp.  and United Microelectronics Corp. have produced customer system-on-chip (SoC) ICs with a density of over 300 million gates.

The successful fabrication of the communication infrastructure ICs demonstrates the two companies' ability to deliver highly complex SoCs for third-party customers with lower development risk, design effort, and overall time-to-market.

The 300 million gate-count IC was built on UMC's volume production 40nm process. It will enable tremendous bandwidth for advanced communication applications that require consistently high throughput capabilities. By comparison, a standard USB 3.0 IC controller chip has 12 million gates. The much more complex chips integrate over 100 types of IP into the design, and feature an extra large 100MB SRAM size to power next generation communication products.

"Typically, this kind of complex IC requires enormous time and engineering resources to come to fruition," said Roger Cheng, VP of ASIC Business at Faraday. "Working closely with UMC and our customer, we were able to leverage Faraday's strong know-how in IP development, abundant IP pool, efficient SoC design platform, and long-term familiarity with the foundry process to quickly expedite the delivery of this SoC. We look forward to bringing this product to high volume for our customer in the coming months."

S.C. Chien, VP of Advanced Technology Development division at UMC, said: "With a design partner with proven SoC capabilities such as Faraday, customers can leverage the UMC-Faraday team to realize their complex SoC needs as demonstrated by the success of this 300 million gate-count IC. These large die-size SoCs are nearly four times the size of normal ICs, demonstrating the high complexity involved in its design. UMC's ability to rapidly bring these sophisticated SoCs from the design stage to manufacturing underscores our proven advanced technology and world-class manufacturing capabilities gained through over 30 years of semiconductor industry experience."