UMC Brand Guidelines: Taiwan’s First Chip Company, Spun Out of ITRI in 1980

A government research lab turns a pilot line into a company.

United Microelectronics Corporation, known everywhere as UMC, was set up on 22 May 1980 in Hsinchu as a spin-off of Taiwan’s government-sponsored Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). English Wikipedia calls it Taiwan’s first semiconductor company and the first private integrated-circuit company on the island. When Infosecurity Magazine covered the company in October 2020, it described UMC as a Hsinchu foundry that had “turned 40 this year.”

Chinese-language Wikipedia tells the longer story. In the 1970s ITRI brought CMOS chip technology from the American company RCA and built Taiwan’s first integrated-circuit demonstration plant in 1977. To turn that into an industry, ITRI joined banks, investment houses and electronics makers — among them TECO, Sampo and Walsin Lihwa — to fund a new chip factory in May 1980. ITRI then moved its four-inch wafer technology and a research team into the company. The first chairman was Fang Hsien-chi, ITRI’s second president.

The Chinese name, 聯華電子 (Lianhua Dianzi), says something about how the company began. Chinese Wikipedia explains that several of the founding shareholders had the character 華 in their names, so the new firm was called “united Hua” electronics. In English the company uses the initials UMC.

In July 1985 UMC listed on the Taiwan Stock Exchange, the first semiconductor company to do so, according to both English and Chinese Wikipedia. That year Morris Chang, who had just returned to Taiwan to lead ITRI, also became UMC’s chairman. Chinese Wikipedia says Robert Tsao, who had come over from ITRI’s electronics lab, became president in 1981 and had already floated the idea of a dedicated chip-making service. Chang went on to chair the new TSMC when it was founded in 1987, and in 1991 he stepped down as UMC’s chairman, Chinese Wikipedia says.

From making its own chips to making everyone else’s.

For its first fifteen years UMC was an integrated device maker: it designed, made and packaged its own chips. In 1995 it decided to become a pure-play foundry, building wafers only for other companies’ designs. Chinese Wikipedia says that at the time foundry work was only about a third of the business, and that UMC first raised money for new eight-inch plants through three joint ventures with eleven chip-design firms from the United States, Canada and elsewhere.

To reassure customers that their designs would not leak to an in-house rival, UMC spun off its own design teams in 1996. They became separate companies, among them MediaTek, Novatek, Faraday Technology and ITE Technology, according to English Wikipedia. Then in 1999 and 2000 UMC folded four affiliated foundry companies back into the parent in what Chinese Wikipedia calls the “five-in-one” merger.

The company moved to bigger wafers at the same time. Its first 12-inch (300 mm) plant, Fab 12A, was set up in the Tainan Science Park in 1999. In 2000 UMC listed in New York, where its American Depositary Shares trade under the ticker UMC; English Wikipedia says it made the industry’s first chips with copper interconnects and the first 0.13-micron chips that year. A 12-inch fab in Singapore entered mass production in 2004.

Expansion across Asia followed. UMC fully took over the Hejian wafer fab in Suzhou in 2013 and set up the United Semi 12-inch fab in Xiamen in 2015, according to English Wikipedia. In Japan it bought Mie Fujitsu Semiconductor outright; Chinese Wikipedia says the transfer was completed on 1 October 2019 and the plant was renamed United Semiconductor Japan. In 2017, Chinese Wikipedia says, UMC announced it would no longer chase the most advanced processes below 14 nm, concentrating instead on mature and specialty lines such as logic and mixed-signal, embedded high-voltage, embedded non-volatile memory, RF-SOI and BCD. In 2024 Intel and UMC announced a joint 12 nm process, with production targeted for 2027, English Wikipedia reports.

How foundries present themselves.

Contract chip makers sell a service rather than a product with their own name on it. The chips they make leave the plant under their customers’ names, so a foundry’s identity has to be built from the things it can show: the wafer, the cleanroom, the fab and the people who run it.

The wafer is the usual starting point. Foundry photographs often show a finished wafer held up to the light, its grid of chips throwing back a rainbow sheen, or a stack of wafers in a carrier ready for the next step. Close-ups of patterned silicon give a company a recognisable image without revealing any customer’s design.

Inside the fab, the pictures follow a familiar pattern: engineers in full-body cleanroom suits, often called bunny suits, standing at tools under the yellow light used in lithography areas; long, bright corridors lined with equipment; and overhead transport systems carrying wafer pods along tracks in the ceiling. From outside, aerial shots of fab campuses, with their long, low buildings and utility plants, stand in for scale and capacity.

Foundries also present themselves at trade shows and conferences, such as the SEMICON exhibitions held in several regions, as well as through their own technology events for customers. Their names usually travel as abbreviations or short forms, and their written materials lean on process names, node figures and fab locations. This guide sets out what can be checked about each company — who founded it, who owns it, where it makes wafers — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

A trade-secret case, a settlement and fabs in four countries.

UMC’s most serious legal matter came from the United States. In September 2018 a federal grand jury indicted UMC, together with the Chinese state-owned memory maker Fujian Jinhua, over trade secrets belonging to the American memory company Micron. On 28 October 2020 the US Justice Department announced that UMC had pleaded guilty to one count of criminal trade secret theft, Infosecurity Magazine reported the next day. Under the plea agreement UMC accepted a fine, a three-year term of probation and a duty to cooperate with the US government, and the other criminal charges and a parallel civil suit against it were to be dismissed. In November 2021 UMC and Micron announced a global settlement, each withdrawing its complaints against the other, according to English and Chinese Wikipedia.

Today UMC remains headquartered in the Hsinchu Science Park. English Wikipedia says it has 12 manufacturing facilities, including four 300 mm fabs — one each in Taiwan, Singapore, China and Japan — and describes it as a significant supplier to the automotive industry. The company also joined the RE100 renewable-electricity initiative in 2021, Chinese Wikipedia says, with targets running to 2050.

For a design guide, UMC shows how a company can be built from a research lab, a group of shareholders and a set of initials, and then reshape itself around making other people’s chips. Compare TSMC, which Morris Chang chaired while still connected to UMC, and GlobalFoundries, another contract chip maker. For this guide we use a deep navy, a muted teal and a pale wafer grey with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

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