Here's the rest of what I remember from the Salomon
Tech Conference:
5) The Soros deal is poorly understood and really was a very good deal. Soros has not been shorting the stock and has sold only a tiny
fraction of his shares to get holdings down to a certain previously
specified level. His groups holdings make them the second largest
shareholder of Amati Corp. stock.
6)Amati has had tremendous input into the development of TI's C6X
chip. When the company was given original samples of the chip, they
could not get even 1 modem on a chip because of problems in the way
the chip handled I/O. JS went through some rough calculations indicating the number of bits that would have to be handled which was
huge. Amati has helped to resolve this issue and as stated the pending
chips due for delivery in October should be able to handle 2 modems per chip with 4 modems per chip expected sometime in 1998. Also, TI
engineers spent a month developing software for FFT (fast fourier transforms) but it worked poorly. Because of Amati engineering experience and knowledge, the FFT software was rewritten in 2 days and
worked much better than the original.
7)ADI chip set satisfies only level of the DMT standard and does not
offer echo cancellation or forward error correction (not sure I have these terms exactly correct). At any rate, this will cost them a loss
of several thousand feet in terms of reach for there solution. He further stated that Alcatel has been working on DMT for 3plus years, at times with Amati's help, and still didn't have it right yet. Felt US Robotics/3 COM didn't stand a chance of rapidly developing a solution of their own.
8)DMT-VDSL solution 3 years ago did not work so everyone abandoned it.
Amati said "How can we make it work?" and worked hard to do so. Amati
developed a "ping-pong solution" (not sure what this exactly is) that
has now been proven to work just fine and first silicon of ).25 micron amchips is expected shortly from NEC with production quantities expected in first quarter 1998.
9)JS again reiterated that licensing by ADI and Alcatel was imminent
but as has already been mentionned on the thread, this would not provide large amounts of cash to Amati. It would however, validate
Amati's leadership position, the overall technology and Amati's patents and intellectual property (my editorialization here, opinion
only).
10)JS also hinted that another contract award could be announced shortly but he wouldn't give details. Those who have been following this thread can easily guess at what contract he is talking about, altho that would still be pure speculation as no formal announcment
has been made.
That's all for now. Will post more as I remember it. Overall, very
exciting time to be owning Amati stock. JS was clearly simply trying
to present arguments as to why the risk of owning Amati now is low
while presenting facts that hint at possible future rewards tempered by his very conservative interpretation of those facts.
Just Call Me Doc |
