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Technology Stocks : LSI Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jock Hutchinson who wrote (19589)	8/3/1999 2:08:00 PM
From: Lucinos	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25814

The FPGA chips from Xlnx and Altr are mainly for three categories of applications at this moment. They are good tools for debugging of your prototype designs (however, it still needs to have a better tool to convert the FPGA design to ASIC). They are suitable for products that sell in small quantity (either in its early stage of life cycle, or for some specially purpose designs in low volume). Also, they can be reprogrammed at field in real time (only a small amount of applications requires this feature currently. However it may have some room for growth in the future). To the customers, the purpose of using FPGA in real product is mainly for getting the product into the market as quickly as possible (usually the cost is not a concern for this situation). So, you can see these two FPGA companies are in a very different chip segment than LSI currently is. For the next few years, although FPGA is penetrating into the high gate count logic market, still, it will be only attractive for low volume designs and products require many frequent modification (FPGA will still be expansive). With the FPGA core adopted by LSI, there will be some overlap in the future for FPGA and LSI in some special applications. However, it can not be too significant, since LSI is targeting the high volume market, and is not developed for prototyping of which FPGA is designed for. At this moment, since the cost and performance of FPGA is significantly advanced, XLNX and ALTR is growing at a fast speed momentarily. To me, LSI can take the full advantage of it as long as it can provide a better tool to convert the FPGA design to LSI library to the designers. In this way, it will create a win-win situation for all these companies and the customers. I hope you can see the reason that I don't think the comment made by that analyst in the new release published a few days ago has any merit. That guy needs to talk to the engineers that are doing the design work at daily basis, otherwise, he will easily lose his job in the near future. Thanks. Lucinos