Three people from UMC will sit on the seven member board of SIS.

This surely suggests the strong possibility that UMC might merge with SIS. The interesting thing is that SIS is a smallish company but has its own fabrication plant, something that's always puzzled us a little in these design boutique days.

Further, the local Taiwanese press today is saying that SIS raised $138 million by selling global depositary receipts.

Read more: The Inquirer.

What exactly does UMC make/do?

something similar to TSMC

Well that doesn't help much...

UMC & TSMC make chips for companies like ATI or nVIDIA who don't have fabrication plants. AMD will be moving its Athlon ( TBred / Barton ) series to TSMC & only Hammer CPUs will be manufactured in their Dresden fab.

TSMC is having a lot of trouble with their 0.13 process, which is why nVIDIA was late with the NV30 & also why ATI decided to do the R9700 Pro in a 0.15 process.

??? Where did you hear that... From what I've read of interviews etc., they'd allways planned the R300 for .15... The RV350 will be their first .13 part.... Not even the R350 will be .013....

With that in mind I doubt they changed their plans from .13 to .15... Especially since there are quite a few differences between design for .15 and .13....

lazy,