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To: Sam Johnson who wrote (12466)	12/9/1999 2:30:00 AM
From: Dr. Id	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 54805

Rambus is holding a conference call tomorrow morning to announce the following. Could be interesting... Thursday December 9 1:29 AM ET Rambus to Target Communications Market, Acquisitions By Therese Poletti SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) - Rambus Inc., the developer of technology to speed up communications between memory chips and processors, said it is expanding its focus to include solving the data bottleneck problems in the growing communications market. As part of this plan, Rambus chief executive Geoff Tate will focus more on strategy, new ventures, intellectual property and acquisitions, and he named David Moring, previously senior vice president, computer and memory group, as president. Rambus also said it promoted Subodh Toprani to senior vice president, and he will lead a newly-formed new ventures group, responsible for acquisitions and investments. Toprani was previously vice president and general manager of logic products. Tate said he will work closely with Toprani on new ventures and acquisitions. The company has not yet made any acquisitions. ``We are often thought of as a DRAM company, but we are a chip to chip communications company,' said Tate. ``We move data between chips at a high rate and cost effectively. We apply the technology we have to the memory problem.' Tate said Rambus has been focusing on communications in the last year, but that he cannot yet give any more details on its plans or its customers in this area. He also said that Rambus is looking at other ways to use its chip to chip communications technology to solve other bottleneck problems in personal computers and consumer products, beyond the memory issues. ``Over the past year we have put more increased resources into communications,' he said. ``The Internet is driving that growth and it means that the switches and routers that have to handle the growing amounts of traffic have an increased need for performance.' He said Rambus's new customers in communications will be announced early next year in January or February. Rambus's memory-enhancing technology just made its first debut in personal computers with Intel Corp.'s (NasdaqNM:INTC - news) new Pentium III family, where it is used in the 820 and 840 chipsets that accompany the new processors. But its debut was not without problems. Intel's 820 chipset was delayed due to some Rambus compatibility problems, but it is now shipping. In the past few months, Rambus's shares have tumbled, as investors worried that PC makers and memory chip makers would not adopt the Rambus technology, which is more costly. Its shares are now trading around 68, down from a 52-week high of 117-1/2. ``Their first objective is to get the PC market focused on,' said George Iwanyc, a senior analyst at Gartner Group's Dataquest. ``It's not a sure thing yet. The 820 has to ramp in volume and sustain that. After that, these other opportunities are a nice way to add to the capability of the technology.' Rambus also said that next year, it plans to double its highest performance chip connection data transfer rate to 1.6 gigahertz, up from 800 megahertz currently. ``That will keep us far in the lead,' Tate said. ``It's very high speed stuff,' said Mark Edelstone, a Morgan Stanley Dean Witter analyst. ``Clearly this is technically feasible, it's just a question of what is involved in getting there. I have no doubt that we will get there.'