"TSMC gives us leading process technology coupled with the economics scale of high volume and lower cost", stated Dr. David Yen, Sun's executive vice president, Microelectronics.

"TSMC is already fully engaged with engineers from both Sun and TI as we make this transition as seamless and as fast as possible", stated Sridhar Vajapey, VP, Technology, Validation and Test, who heads the Sun team that selected TSMC.

"TSMC, working with Sun Microelectronics as their foundry partner together with Texas Instruments, on this industry-leading technology is a tremendous synergy of strengths", stated Jack Sun, vice president of R&D at TSMC. "This collaboration brings together all the ingredients to successfully design, test and manufacture some of the most complex chips in the world on TSMC's CPU-grade manufacturing process."

"TI has had the pleasure of being a strategic partner with Sun for almost two decades and we look forward to working with TSMC to provide turnkey back-end support for Sun's SPARC product roadmap", stated Hunter Ward, TI VP & General Mgr - Sun Business Unit.

Both Sun and TSMC will collaborate to expand Sun's OpenSPARC programme. In the first phase of the programme the two companies will work together to expand the university outreach programme in Taiwan. In addition to its existing university outreach programme, TSMC has a large fabless customer base and a substantial number of large IP partners that will help expand OpenSPARC platform adoption.

Through the OpenSPARC programme, Sun has established six major universities as OpenSPARC Technology Centers of Excellence: the University of California, Santa Cruz; University of Texas, Austin; University of Michigan, Ann Arbor; University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; Stanford University; and Carnegie Mellon University. Each Center of Excellence has a minimum two-year commitment, during which time they'll execute chip design research and course work based on Sun's chip multi-threading (CMT) design.