As I read over here, United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC) will begin 0.13-micron contract manufacturing for Texas Instruments (TI), pushing UMC to the front lines of 12-inch wafer production, said company chief technology officer Fu Tai Liou on April 1. The thing is that TI has long been a client of UMC rival Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company (TSMC), and now they made up their mind to split the orders between the two Taiwanese chip makers. I don’t think that TI would have ever done something like that if UMC had had no 0.13micron production lines ready.

As it had been reported before, UMC was going to start mass production of 0.13micron chips only in summer. Now they say that in Q3 UMC should start producing 0.09micron chips already (this should be a trial shipment first). I wonder what happened? I hope it was not April 1 day that inspired Mr. Fu Tai Liou to make this announcement.