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Technology Stocks : WDC/Sandisk Corporation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Craig Freeman who wrote (12708)	7/9/2000 1:12:44 AM
From: wily	Respond to of 60323

Craig, Wily, check out how SNDK's investment in Tower Semi might affect SSTI and you might see why SSTI is trending downwards. SSTI's "lock" is due to its patents which permit low-demsity flash to be made at lower cost due to fewer mask layers. But their patent is meaningless if someone produces flash at a significantly smaller line width. re: Tower ...Toshiba has contributed its extensive IP and SNDK is in for $75M. When t's over, $1.5B will be invested by all concerned. Tower will make controllers but not pure memory. In the meantime, Toshiba/SNDK and others will produce smaller memory chips with more capacity. Both SNDK's fabs and Toshiba will be able to melt down SSTI's lead. I'm not taking sides here -- I don't own either stock. But, the whole industry migrates to the smaller line widths pretty much together. There's probably some attrition along the way as the smaller players are not able to afford the ever-increasing price of shrinking processes. I'm not that familiar with SST, but I know they do tout their strong relationships with their fab partners. And they also tout the scalability of their process -- if this is a valid claim it could actually turn out to be an important edge they have over Sandisk. wily

To: Craig Freeman who wrote (12708)	7/9/2000 1:45:40 AM
From: wily	Respond to of 60323

If Sandisk can actually maintain or increase margins through 2003, as they claim they will, then this stock should do very well. I don't see how they can be so sure that they will be able to do that, as it depends on how much capacity comes in. If you figure 18 months for the major increments in capacity to come in, that's the beginning of 2002. Then, another 6 months to ramp. So, I guess it's conceivable. But, if DRAM growth doesn't keep up with Flash growth -- and it probably won't -- then you have that large already-installed capacity that will readily migrate, effectively averaging the two industries together. IMO. wily

To: Craig Freeman who wrote (12708)	7/10/2000 9:08:18 AM
From: Allegoria	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 60323

This argument has been discussed before. At the risk of drawing the same wrath you showed for Larry (http://www.siliconinvestor.com/readmsg.aspx?msgid=14014326), maybe I can add slightly to the discussion. From what I have found, SSTI does not have a problem scaling down to smaller sizes. The ability to scale is one of the strengths for the SuperFlash technology. According to SSTI & IBM, a 40 percent reduction in the size of the SuperFlash® cell has just been accomplished. Previous statements by management indicate they feel the progression to smaller and smaller die casts are a major reason why SuperFlash is so economically viable. By SSTI's own words, they expect: "a very fast migration path to cutting-edge process geometries of 0.13µ and below. Shipments of the 0.18µ self-aligned SuperFlash® cell are expected early next year." I think this announcement by SSTI (http://www.ebnonline.com/story/OEG20000707S0015) shows one point very clearly. In earlier posts on this thread, much discussion centered around how SNDK and the other producers of higher density flash (INTL, AMD etc.) would eventually (when a dearth of high density flash emerged) enter the low-density market place and crush SSTI. A simplistic summation of my perspective was that this was fallacious - it was much more likely that SSTI will move up into the higher density market than SNDK or the others will move to producing low-density flash. This announcement is exactly the type of action that I was alluding to…although I think Aus is correct in seeing this product announcement more of a competitive threat to FLSH than SNDK. Good luck to all, Eric