(United Microelectronics Corporation, Hsinchu Science Park, Taiwan) Founded in 1980, UMC was a spin-off of the government-backed Industrial Technology Research Institute (ITRI). The first semiconductor company in Taiwan, UMC is a foundry that makes chips for others, although it initially was an IDM that also designed the circuits. With fabs in Taiwan, Singapore, China and Japan, UMC makes chips that support AI inference at the edge and in IoT devices (see
edge AI and
AI IoT). See
semiconductor companies.