MILPITAS, Calif. and SINGAPORE -- Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing (Nasdaq:CHRT) (SGX-ST:Chartered), one of the world's top three silicon foundries, today announced a joint technology agreement with IMEC, Europe's leading independent R&D center for microelectronics, that will result in Chartered offering 0.18-micron silicon germanium (SiGe) BiCMOS manufacturing capabilities by the second half of 2003. The addition of SiGe BiCMOS complements Chartered's mixed-signal and RF CMOS technology and broadens the offering of total product solutions to give companies more choices in high performance, low noise semiconductor technologies for the RF components of system-on-chip (SOC) applications. According to a new study from Semico Research, as leading foundries expand the availability of cost effective processes, the demand for SiGe integrated circuits is expected to accelerate rapidly in the coming years, becoming a $2.7 billion niche market by 2006(1). The study identifies several key applications that will drive SiGe demand: cellular systems, optical networking, hard disk drives, Bluetooth applications, wireless local area networks, global positioning systems and digital set top boxes. "Chartered's approach uses an existing CMOS baseline process as the starting point and will integrate the SiGe bipolar module to deliver value-added high performance, and in the process reuse their fully-qualified RF passive components. We believe this is significant, because it gives foundry customers more options in balancing overall system costs and performance requirements. Also the timing is right, because Chartered's SiGe module is targeted to be in place as demand hits," said Joanne Itow, senior analyst at Semico Research. Chartered Semiconductor Manufacturing Ltd.