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To: Kayaker who wrote (5342)	1/17/2000 9:32:00 PM
From: w molloy	Respond to of 13582

OT - another player in the DSP market.... LSI Logic signs 1st customer for its wireless designs NEW YORK, Jan 17 (Reuters) - Semiconductor maker LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE:LSI - news), on Monday said it signed its first major customer for its chip designed for wireless and other advanced communication products, putting it on the map in the fast- growing communication chip market. Broadcom Corp. (NasdaqNM:BRCM - news), a leading provider of chips that send voice, video and data over high-speed cable lines, said it would license LSI Logic's ZSP brand of digital signal processors (DSP) that allow people to use computer equipment to make telephone calls over the Internet. ''It really establishes ZSP as a high-profile DSP architecture,'' Salomon Smith Barney analyst Clark Westmont said. ''That's a feather in their hat. It helps them with their credibility when they go to a Cisco or Lucent or IBM when they're touting their own capability.'' LSI declined to disclose the terms of the licensing agreement. John Daane, executive vice president of the company's communications group, said the significance of the deal is not in the revenue it brings but as a milestone it sets in the company's strategy in becoming the standard in the DSP market valued at $3.5 billion in 1998. ''We're really not going after the million-dollar licensing deals,'' he told Reuters. ''We're really going after the billions of dollars in the system solution business,'' Wilfred Corrigan, chief executive of Milpitas, Calif.-based LSI told Reuters in a telephone interview. Chip giant Texas Instruments Inc. (NYSE:TXN - news) currently has about half the DSP market, Morgan Stanley analyst Mark Edelstone said. The chips are used in mobile phones and voice-over-the Internet devices. Last year, the industry was expected to rise 25 percent to $4.4 billion, according to the Semiconductor Industry Association. The market is expected to jump 32 percent to $5.8 billion this year and be worth $9.8 billion by 2002. ''LSI is definitely late entering the DSP market,'' Edelstone said. Using a strategy of opening up the designs to others allows the company to ''gain traction and create some momentum,'' he added. Up until now, high-end DSPs have been proprietary, that is individual chip makers have kept their design out of the public realm, sharing them only with their partners. Now other manufacturers with high-volume customers can use LSI's architecture for their computer chip. ''It simply means you can have other companies write their software code around the DSP architecture that LSI is supplying,'' Edelstone said. Analysts said they expect several similar deals to quickly follow. Although LSI's main sources of revenue are chips used for networking, servers, data storage and consumer electronic games, Corrigan said the DSP chips represent the fastest growing area. ''Communications is rapidly becoming 50 percent of our business,'' he said. ''Going forward all of our architectures in new designs will hae DSP architecture.''