Taiwanese chipmaker United Microelectronics (UMC) is collaborating with ARM to tape out a process qualification vehicle (PQV) test chip on the foundry's 14nm FinFET technology to help validate an ARM Cortex-A family core on the process node. The validation of the UMC 14nm FinFET process technology kickstarts the enablement process for the rest of the IP ecosystem needed for UMC's FinFET technology, including the need for foundation IP and ARM processor physical design, according to the Taiwan-based foundry.

UMC also announced that its 14nm FinFET collaboration with Synopsys has expanded to include the EDA company's DesignWare embedded memory and test solutions. The pair has developed a second UMC 14nm FinFET PQV, following the successful tapeout and silicon bring-up of the first UMC 14nm FinFET PQV containing Synopsys' DesignWare logic libraries and utilizing the StarRC parasitic extraction tool.

UMC's 14-nm FinFET process has demonstrated good 128Mb SRAM yields and is expected to be ready for customer tapeout by late 2015.