May 2, 2001 – San Jose, CA, and Sunnyvale, CA, – Xilinx, Inc., with UMC and Trecenti Technologies, a joint venture fabrication facility between UMC and Hitachi, said that Xilinx built its first Virtex products on 300mm silicon wafers. By taking advantage of the larger wafer sizes, Xilinx will be able to produce more cost effective programmable logic devices, the company said.

According to a recent release, Trecenti is the pureplay foundry industry’s first 300mm enabled fab to deliver wafers. Xilinx will also be using the 300mm format to deliver its next generation high density Platform FPGAs. Incorporating high speed I/O technology, DSP multipliers, and embedded processors, the 300mm version of the Platform FPGAs integrate more than 200 million transistors per die and 37 billion per wafer.

“UMC has been making significant progress with its 300mm enabled fabs, with the Trecenti facility being the first to produce wafers for our customers,” said Jim Kupec, president of UMC USA, in a recent release. “In fact, we started developing wafers in pilot production in December 2000. We are also overseeing the development of two other 300mm fabs, with one in Taiwan and the other in Singapore.”