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

To: M. who wrote (20189)	10/14/1999 8:52:00 PM
From: patrick tang	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25814

LSI's business areas are so diverse it's hard for just one person to analyze it. Do hope others with more knowledge will join in. If we do that, we might get a jump on the analysts. Even with their insider info, I doubt that the analysts can understand what management tells them. I'm sort of scratching my head on the Hitachi deal too. Great tie-up with such a huge Japanese company, what what else can LSI get out it in the short or even medium term. By that, I mean I just can't see too much real financial benefits for this up cycle. I was going to day I don't see much value for DRAM, but I'm changing my mind as I speak. Embedded DRAM, IMO, is only good for some kind of embedded CPU/graphic chip. Perhaps this can come in handy in the set-top box area by providing single chip solutions that include the graphic ram too. Once can easily have a one chip Linux web appliance that includes everything, memory included. That was Halla's dream when he went over to NSM and bought Cyrix. But perhaps an x86 web appliance is just not that attractive from a die size point of view. Better to have a Linux machine with RISC and embedded DRAMs too (not to mention I/O + drive-on-chip). To me, I just don't think any chip guy had really won too big in this STB kind of a thing. The web appliance is just developing. Hopefully the DRAM offering can drive the STB/wev appliance thing in LSI's advantage. Anybody correct on me this, I think IBM can do embedded DRAM, but I don't really see them being too big in the consumer market with their products. I don't think ADI or LU can provide embedded DRAMs. As for Hitachi, Tony Viola can correct me if I'm wrong, but they are really falling behind in DRAM like the other Japanese guys. But unlike NEC and Toshiba who are making good head-way with logic chips, Hitachi may need some 'help' to jump start their efforts. I see the foundry and SOC guys all heading to roughly the same turf, notice I said roughly only. There is another barrier to doing foundry business. e.g. If I were to start a foundry, the first question my salesman get asked by a potential customer may be something like "Is your 0.25um process competible to either TSMC's or UMC's". That is because the customers generally designed their chip using TSMC's or UMC's process design rule and design models. They will not put in extra efforts in re-designing the chips to go into another fab with a different process. It is to LSI's advantage in the long run to have a lot of capacity and chip designs 'standardized' to their process. But really that part of business is low-tech stuff. Not really the high tech stuff that LSI is into. Longer term, having more relations with somebody like Hitachi in Japan just cannot hurt. patrick