Faraday Announces the Industry's Smallest 0.18um Library-miniLib

HSINCHU Taiwan and SUNNYVALE CA, March 31, 2005 -- As 0.18µm process technology matures, the corresponding end products also encountered a dramatic drop in the average selling price. To counter balance this inevitable phenomenon, the designers at Faraday have endeavored to develop more price-competitive IPs. As a bellwether in IC design service industry, Faraday has invested considerable R&D resources to develop the industry's smallest library on UMC 0.18µm process, the miniLib™. The result is a solution that provides market competitiveness for customers by reducing the total IC area, hence the production cost.

miniLib™ is an Ultra High Density (UHD) library based on UMC's 0.18µm GII process technology. It comes with approximately 100 functions and 300+ cells and is fully compatible with most major EDA tools. As a consequence of a seamless collaboration with UMC, the library also fully complies with the high-yield volume production flow.

miniLib™ is a standard cell library designed with drastically shrunk area and reduced power consumption. In real ASIC designs with miniLib™ such as MP3 players and pendrive controllers, miniLib™ has achieved a standard cell area reduction of 30% and a power reduction of 25% without any sacrifice in performance as compared to other 0.18µm standard cell libraries.

“Most IP vendors today place their emphasis on developing high performance IPs using advanced process but ignore the importance of maintaining the competitiveness of customers on more matured process technologies”, said Hsin Wang, Associated vice president of R &D at Faraday. “But in fact, many of the end products today still take low power and low cost as highest concerns of their design requirements.”

Availability

miniLib™ library is available today in UMC 0.18µm GII process technology.

About Faraday Technology Corporation

Faraday Technology Corporation is a leading silicon IP and fabless ASIC vendor. The company's broad IP portfolio includes 32-bit RISC CPUs, DSPs, and PHYs/Controllers for USB 2.0, Ethernet, Serial ATA and PCI Express. With more than 500 employees and 2004 revenue of US$159 million, Faraday is one of the largest fabless ASIC companies in the Asia-Pacific region, and it also has a significant presence in other world-wide markets. Headquartered in Taiwan , Faraday has service and support offices around the world, including the U.S. , Japan , Europe, and China . For more information, please visit: http://www.faraday-tech.com