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Technology Stocks : Rambus (RMBS) - Eagle or Penguin -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: unclewest who wrote (26308)	8/3/1999 7:18:00 PM
From: Dave B	Respond to of 93625

It's not a Taiwanese conspiracy to lock up the low-end system market, it's a worldwide conspiracy! (it also looks like Via has decided to piss off everyone along the way) ... ------------------------- Trident slaps suit on design partner Via. (Trident Microsystems, Via Technologies)(Company Business and Marketing) Electronic Buyers' News, July 26, 1999 p5 Author Hachman, Mark Full Text Silicon Valley- With friends like these ... Graphics-chip maker Trident Microsystems Inc. last week sued its design partner, Via Technologies Inc., charging the company with breach of contract, fraud, and patent infringement. The suit is the latest crack in the facade of a block of companies whose common goal was to provide an alternative to Intel Corp.'s architecture-a group whose principal members include Via [Taiwan], Trident [U.K], Acer Laboratories Inc. [Taiwan], and National Semiconductor Corp. [U.S.] Trident's suit, filed in federal court in Santa Clara, Calif., charges Via with breaking the carefully orchestrated marketing arrangement that existed between the companies' jointly designed products. It also alleges that Via illegally lured away 25 Trident engineers to its own design team. Representatives at Via's U.S headquarters in Fremont, Calif., said they were aware of Trident's suit, but had not formed a response by press time. Executives at Trident, based in Mountain View, Calif., said the company had a deal with Via under which Trident integrated its CyberBlade graphics core into two of Via's chipsets-the MVP4 and ProMedia. Under the agreement, Via was supposed to market the MVP4 and ProMedia to desktop PC customers. Trident, meanwhile, which sells most of its graphics ICs into the portable-computing market, was granted access to Via's core-logic technology and designed its own parts-the CyberBlade i7 and i1-for notebook-PC OEMs. "We believe Via violated that fundamental market direction," said Gerry Liu, Trident's senior vice president of marketing. Liu said the Via agreement has led to "complaints and confusion" on the part of Trident's customers, who are unsure from which company they are supposed to buy their chipsets. Liu also said Via violated a separate agreement under which the companies were supposed to share revenue and profits from chipset sales. And law-enforcement agencies in Taiwan have searched Via offices used by the former Trident employees, looking for documents that may prove Via used illegal hiring practices, Liu added. In its suit, Trident is seeking to halt sales of Via's MVP4 and ProMedia chipsets, and will ask for $200 million in punitive damages plus unspecified actual damages. The Trident complaint marks Via's second legal entanglement in less than a month. After charging Via with breaking terms of a P6 bus license by including a 133-MHz frontside bus in its new Apollo Pro 133 chipset, Intel filed suit against the company in a San Jose federal court. Via has since tried to exploit a legal loophole, manufacturing its P6-based chipsets at National Semiconductor by piggybacking on a separate licensing agreement National has with Intel. Additionally, Via earlier this month bought National's discrete microprocessor subsidiary, Cyrix Corp., which has been one of Intel's chief rivals. Via also has signed separate deals with graphics makers S3 Inc. and Trident for integrated chipsets. In advance of its suit, Trident signed a deal on Wednesday with one of Via's rivals, which sources said was Acer Labs. The flurry of licensing deals is indicative of a trend among chipset makers to seek out partners in the graphics industry with which to develop integrated products. This phenomenon is being driven by the popularity of low-cost PCs, which have forced chip suppliers to develop integrated parts to lower their bill-of-materials cost. Save for San Jose's 3Dfx Interactive Inc., every other mainstream PC graphics company has signed a deal to integrate its cores into a third-party core-logic chipset. Although Nvidia Inc., Santa Clara, Calif., has so far not publicly disclosed its own integration plans, the company hired Kenneth Ma away from Trident to become senior director of its integrated business. In an interview, Ma called the integration of graphics and core logic "inevitable."

To: unclewest who wrote (26308)	8/3/1999 7:39:00 PM
From: Kiriwuth Path	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 93625

Looks like we should get the AMD announcement to support Rambus this coming Monday. Next week may turn out to be very big for Rambus, including PixelFusion's demo at SIGGRAPH99 (sp?) and possibly details on Sun's new chip (mid-August). dailynews.yahoo.com Clip: Advanced Micro Device Inc. is planning a family. The company on Monday will make public plans for a family of several new Athlon brand names, including a high-performance desktop brand and enterprise and consumer Athlon versions, sources close to the Sunnyvale, Calif., chip maker confirmed today.

To: unclewest who wrote (26308)	8/3/1999 9:04:00 PM
From: Dave B	Respond to of 93625

Or maybe it is a Taiwanese conspiracy and they want to take over the entire chip-world... ----------------------- LAN-chip entrants aim at low end. (Taiwanese-backed suppliers)(Company Business and Marketing) Electronic Buyers' News, July 26, 1999 p34 Author Chen, Sandy Full Text Taipei, Taiwan- Amid fierce competition in the LAN-switch chip business, a new crop of Taiwanese-backed suppliers are looking to change the dynamics at the low end of the market. These vendors-ADMtek Inc., Atan Technology Inc., F3 Inc., Realtek Semiconductor Corp., Via Technologies Inc., Warpcom Corp., and a few others-are in various stages of introducing low-cost eight-port chips for use in entry-level switches in Fast Ethernet networks. Consequently, these companies will be in direct competition with the established switch-chip suppliers in the market, such as Allayer, Broadcom, and Galileo. The worldwide switch-chip market is projected to grow from $342 million in 1998 to $910 million by 2002, according to Dataquest Inc., San Jose. Though the new Taiwanese-backed vendors are a little late in entering the business, they will try to gain market share by undercutting their foreign rivals in terms of product pricing, according to an executive at Accton Technology Corp., one of Taiwan's largest suppliers of hubs, switches, and other equipment. Hsinchu-based Accton makes equipment under its own logo, as well as for OEMs such as Cisco and 3Com. "I believe that the chips [from the new Taiwanese-backed vendors] will become mature and stable by the fourth quarter of 1999 or first quarter of 2000," the Accton executive said. "By then, pricing will really get fierce in the [switch-chip] business."