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Technology Stocks : Broadcom (BRCM) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stoctrash who wrote (3220)	12/5/1999 9:48:00 PM
From: SurfForWealth	Respond to of 6531

Article regarding BRCM award! Cheers!!! FSA lauds Broadcom, Marvell -- Recognizes broadband-IC providers as most respected fabless companies of 1999 SATURDAY, DECEMBER 04, 1999 12:17 AM - CMP Media Dec. 03, 1999 (Electronic Buyers News - CMP via COMTEX) -- Silicon Valley- Any lingering doubt that communications will usurp the PC as the driver for the semiconductor industry was assuaged last week when two rising stars in the broadband arena were named as the most respected public and private fabless companies of 1999. Broadcom Corp., receiving the Fabless Semiconductor Association's top award for the second year in a row, shared the spotlight with Marvell Semiconductor Inc., a feisty newcomer that is challenging Broadcom's top position on the Fast Ethernet totem pole. In many ways, the fabless business model is well suited for the communications-chip segment. The constant forward march of standards places a heavy burden on a company's design resources. Communications-chip suppliers have stayed nimble by outsourcing production. Today, well over half of the FSA's members supply chips for some form of communications application. "The fabless concept has really enabled this entire class of specialized communications companies to appear," said Bob Merritt, a Semico Research Corp. analyst based in Redwood City, Calif. "You don't have to look much farther than Broadcom or Level One to see how successful it's been." If the communications segment is the embodiment of the fabless business model, the backbone has been the pure-play silicon foundry, which was created in part by Morris Chang, chairman and founder of Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Co. Ltd. Chang last week became the first recipient of the FSA's new award recognizing unique contributions to the fabless sector. The award will henceforth be known as the "Dr. Morris Chang Award for Exemplary Leadership." Here's a look at the FSA's top award recipients. Broadcom Corp. Much of Broadcom's strength has come from its intimate knowledge of the system, and with it, the ability to anticipate emerging market needs and deliver chips ahead of competitors, said analyst Alvin Kressler of Kaufman Bros. LP, New York. As a pioneer in cable modems, the Irvine, Calif., company helped shape the market's standards, and is repeating that strategy with its venture into home networking. But in the LAN-chip segment, where standards were already well defined, Broadcom moved in and handily displaced some highly credible competition, Kressler said. "Broadcom did that because they were able to drive designs down in line width, which allowed them to drive up port density-and at the end of the day, the biggest issue in networking is cost per port," Kressler said. "They've been good at introducing products that keep moving that forward." It shows in the company's top line. Riding one of the fastest revenue run rates in the history of the chip industry, Broadcom is on track this year to more than double its 1998 net sales of $203 million, up from $37 million in 1997. Marvell Semiconductor Inc. Two years after shipping its first product, Marvell is starting to see returns. This year, the company expects to post revenue in the high-$70-million range, up from just $16.5 million in 1998. While the company has risen to its current heights solely on its mass-storage IC line-and now ranks among the leading suppliers of read channels-Marvell believes its recent entry into the LAN-chip arena will spur an even faster ascension to the top of the networking heap. At the heart of Marvell's market strategy is a DSP know-how that separates it from all but its most feared and admired competitor-Broadcom-according to Sehat Sutardja, president and chief executive of the Sunnyvale, Calif., company. "It's not easy for a newcomer to get into this market unless they have a significant advantage over existing solutions, which might be performance, robustness of the design, lower power, or lower cost," Sutardja said. "All of these characteristics are in our chip." Marvell's recently introduced Fast Ethernet octal physical-layer device is just entering production but has already garnered the company the prestige of outperforming rival chips in industry-sanctioned interoperability tests. Yet the 10/100 chip is simply a springboard into the emerging Gigabit Ethernet PHY and switch arena. It's there that Marvell's technology will really shine, according to Sutardja. "In the future, customers in the data- communications space will either look at our solution or Broadcom's," he said. By: Crista Souza Copyright 1999 CMP Media Inc.