Do you know who is making (or trying to make) SiGe chips? It might be nice to hedge our bets with another technology.
craig.
for the record, IBM's Microelectronics Division pioneered SiGe technology, but as TD excellently emphasized, it's the end market that matters. VTSS got over half (51%) of its FY98 revenue from SONET/SDH products in the fiber-optic telecom arena.
if you're looking for names, PMC-sierra excluded, the company that most often comes up as a VTSS competitor is applied micro circuits (AMCC), which signed a deal in july to use IBM's SiGe technology for both SONET and ATM applications. VTSS and AMCC even share a few customers: alcatel and cisco come to mind. however, if you look back, history has already shown that many bipolar silicon players have opted out of the market (e.g., AMD, fujitsu, NEC, and texas instruments). so while GaAs isn't exactly easy to produce, it's now arguably become a simpler manufacturing process. for VTSS, anyway.
I also think it's significant to note that the big telecoms who buy these integrated circuits don't switch suppliers lightly. VTSS has locked up a number of customers on GaAs and the switches lucent, ericsson, et al. make from them don't exactly come cheap.
If you're looking for info on SiGe specifically, i've found techweb pretty handy. Here's a "SiGe" search link of the site:
techweb.com
do let us know what you do or find,
-chris. |
