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Technology Stocks : SILICON STORAGE SSTI Flash Mem -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Snowshoe who wrote (1445)	12/23/2000 5:36:29 PM
From: Zeev Hed	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1881

Snowshoe, I have commented a number of time on OUM. IMHO, the very smart Lowrey was taken to the cleaners on this one. Ovshinsky has been trying for the last 30 years plus to get this technology to work, and in 1971, I have explained, in what I thought was a concise manner, why it could not fly. You can sum it very simply, a transition from the amorphous to the crystalline phase (and vice versa) is a first order phase transition, with a non zero change in the free energy of the system (unlike a second order phase transition, in which only the first derivative (vs T) has a discontinuity). Thus, every time you change from one state to the other you have to put in or extract heat from the system. Putting heat in, is easy to do fast, taking it out is difficult. Furthermore, there are major questions of phase nucleation that slow down the process, and last, whatever works very nice with "three dimensional systems" has a good reason not to work in essentially two dimensional systems encountered in extremely thin films (required to match the cell density in EEPROM type devices). I think that like Trilogy, this will fail miserably after they'll spend more than $300 MM of OPM. By the way, it will not be the first time that Stan Ovshinski managed to get OPM in the hundreds of Millions range in ventures that failed, the last failure was his display company (OVON) now in Ch. 11. Zeev

To: Snowshoe who wrote (1445)	12/24/2000 12:05:58 PM
From: hueyone	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1881

Snowshoe, Periodically I hear that we need to watch out from below and that Fram technology is going to disrupt SST's and other flash companies' business. For that reason I have had Ramtron (RMTR) on my watch list and check the financials for RMTR on a quarterly basis. My conclusion has been that Ramtron seems to remain a company whose promise is always delayed further and further out on to the horizon. Over the last twelve months during boomtime for nearly all flash companies, when SST's quarterly revenues went from 35 million in Q3, '99 to 163 mill in Q3, '00, RMTR's revenues went from 7.1 mill to 8.1 mill over the same period. While SST's EPS increased from .01 EPS in Q3, '99 to .37 EPS Q3, '00, RMTR's EPS went from a positive 27 EPS to a negative .17 EPS loss over the same period. Losses for RMTR are expected to increase this quarter. Nevertheless, earlier this month, Infineon invested $30 million in Ramtron. Ramtron is not going away and I plan to continue to keep an eye on it, but right now the performance from a financial viewpoint simply is not there. Meanwhile SST is growing fast and not sitting still. SST works with IBM, Samsung Electronics, Sanyo, Seiko-Epson and TSMC to develop new technology for manufacturing SST products. SST is also working with IBM, Sanyo and TSMC on developing a new compact cell size. (Source: Nov 29 CSFB conference below) tech.csfb.com Perhaps one possible indicator of the effectiveness SST's research department, SST's IP and business plan is SST's sales per employee---an astounding $1,500,000 million per employee versus an average $350,000 per employee for the industry. (Source: CSFB conference--same link as above.) Best, Huey