Got this off the ATML thread, sure is a great story on XICOR.
Found this article this morning on a rival of Atmel's whose name is
Xicor. Sorry to clutter up space on this forum, but I thought the
story may be of some value. Here it goes:
EEPROM keys Xicor recovery
Source: Electronic Engineering Times
Milpitas, Calif., Electronic Engineering Times via Individual Inc. :
Despite struggles that had some observers giving up the company for
dead, Xicor Inc. was expecting to receive a warm reception at its
annual shareholders' meeting last week..
The company, a veteran of the nonvolatile-memory market, is
profitable and growing once again, and its stock has rebounded
from the $2-a-share doldrums to a healthy $12 level. The company
is even expanding its Milpitas fab as demand grows.
"We are sold out, and we think we will be sold out for a long
time," said Raphael Klein, chairman and president of Xicor.
Originators of the E2PROM market, Xicor fell on hard times as its
product line aged. Chief executive Raphael Klein said Xicor also
had trouble converting its 4-inch fab to 6-inch processes.
The combination gave Atmel Corp. and other competitors a chance
to move past Xicor. In 1992, Xicor lost $30 million, and
its revenues were flat at $93 million a year.
To rebuild Xicor, Klein has turned to new products. Xicor has
been developing a proprietary line of E2PROMs and related
memory chips, and Klein's plan for the future is to drive
the company's sales with a continual flow of new products.
At the same time, Xicor is scattering its attention to
several different markets, most with the common thread of personal
communications such as cellular phones, where E2PROMs' compact
size and low power consumption give the technology an advantage
over flash memory. The result has been a "very lively" product
line, as Klein puts it.
Wall Street notices
Last summer, investors began to take notice of Xicor's turnaround.
The company's stock entered 1995 languishing around $2 per share
but climbed as high as $9 late in the year. This year, when Xicor
drew praise from Wall Street analysts in May, the stock hit another
hot streak, jumping to $14 a share before settling down to the $12
level.
The company in 1995 reported profits of $10 million on revenues
of $114 million, compared with profits of $2.3 million on revenues
of $103 million in 1994.
The competition is still out there, but Klein can afford to joke
about it now, emphasizing E2PROMs as the market Xicor created and
can again be a force in.
"Atmel has given us an excellent commendation by copying us,"
he said. "Flattery is nice, but I would rather do without it."
Klein doesn't expect to see many new players in the E2PROM chase.
Each product goes into a limited set of applications, so
the volume isn't high enough to encourage a foundry to muscle
into Xicor's E2PROM turf. One 8-inch wafer could produce a whole
year's supply of a certain chip, Klein said.
SerialFlash
Xicor's proprietary products include SerialFlash, its serial-interface
memory introduced last year as a more compact alternative to flash
memory.
The company sees SerialFlash coexisting with standard flash in some
cases. If flash memory is holding firmware and a system BIOS, it might
be handy to have SerialFlash carry user-input data.
"People are nervous about writing to the memory that stores their main
program," said Bruce Mattern, Xicor vice president of marketing.
Xicor's plan hinges on proprietary products like SerialFlash, and Klein
expects to see the rate of product introductions increase this year.
Among the company's planned products is a 1-million-transistor
programmable digital-signal processor, due for release by
early next year. Xicor also is developing an E2PROM designed as an
alternative to ROM for storing system programs. The
selling point would be development speed, Klein said-E2PROMs can be
programmed on-the-fly, while ROM is programmable only at the factory.
This year, the company also expects to release groups of standard
E2PROMs with extra features such as watchdog timers tacked on.
Possible future markets include smart cards, which can be made of
an E2PROM die embedded on a plastic credit card instead of a
semiconductor package.
Xicor is working on some vertical applications of smart cards
and hopes to broaden into the greater market as smart cards
proliferate.
Copyright - 1996 CMP Media Inc.
<<Electronic Engineering Times -- 06-24-96, p. 30>>
--- By Craig Matsumoto
[06-24-96 at 16:01 EDT, Copyright 1996, CMP Publications, Inc.]
If anyone has some anaylsis of Xicor or of this story, please write
it out. |
