UMC selected by TrendChip for manufacturing of Taiwan's first turnkey ADSL residential solution.

TrendChip Technologies Corporation and UMC, a leading semiconductor foundry (NYSE:UMC), have announced that TrendChip's WireExpress ADSL chipset, the first product in its xDSL family, is being manufactured in volume on UMC's 0.18 micron CMOS process technology. UMC is producing the digital portion of the SoC (system on chip) solution, which features a network processor and a Discrete Multi-Tone (DMT) digital signal processor (DSP). The dual-chip solution, composed of TrendChip's TC3160 ADSL processor and Silicon Laboratories' Si3101 highly-integrated analog front end (AFE), is designed to address the cost and performance requirements of the ADSL customer premise equipment (CPE) market.

"Our new WireExpress is a breakthrough in the Taiwanese market, particularly as the TC3160 supports ADSL, Ethernet, PCMCIA (for WLAN integration), and USB," noted Shin-Jou Fang, president of TrendChip. "We needed a leading semiconductor foundry partner to help us ensure silicon success. As UMC has a proven track-record in manufacturing sophisticated products as well as offerings that target the communications market, it made an excellent choice for helping us with our product. The result is excellent foundry support and meeting our volume production requirements within our target market window."

Jackson Hu, CEO at UMC, commented, "Developing dual chip technology like TrendChip's WireExpress requires design knowledge, cooperation between all development partners and manufacturing expertise. As such, we are delighted that our close collaboration with TrendChip has resulted in this SoC offering, and that we were able to provide the support and manufacturing solutions that they were seeking in order to deliver their product."

TrendChip's ADSL IC is Taiwan's first entry into the rapidly growing ADSL IC market. As part of this solution, TrendChip is also providing a WireExpress reference modem, which is a complete Residential Gateway turnkey solution with all of the hardware and software needed for bridge, router, or WLAN access point capabilities.