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Technology Stocks : Semi Equipment Analysis -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (5261)	9/2/2002 5:39:39 PM
From: Gottfried	Respond to of 95385

Cary, I'll post any CC sales on the Full Disclosure thread. I have none in mind today. PS: I'm watching real time BBC TV news via Media Player as I type. Nice use of the internet. The BBC web site has useful country profiles, most with links to local web sites. Saudi Arabian economic statistics are at least 3 years old. Gottfried

To: Cary Salsberg who wrote (5261)	9/5/2002 4:54:42 PM
From: Return to Sender	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 95385

LSI in Its Biggest Product Launch in Near a Decade Wednesday September 4, 12:06 am ET By Eric Auchard biz.yahoo.com NEW YORK (Reuters) - LSI Logic Corp. (NYSE:LSI - News) will unveil on Wednesday its biggest new product push in eight years, targeting what it sees as an $11 billion emerging market for custom-designed chips that can be built at low cost. The new product line, to be known as RapidChip, consists of a set of modules for adding various basic technology features, together with customizable logic and a mainstream set of chip design tools, company executives said in an interview. "Our customers need the ability to configure their chips quickly with increased predictability at a lower cost," said Rick Marz, executive vice president of communications and custom-chip technology at LSI, a Milpitas, California company. The new chip development system can greatly expand LSI's customer base and open up to LSI an $11 billion chunk of the overall $48 billion custom-programmed chip market in which LSI competes, said Handel Jones, a consultant with International Business Strategies (ISB), in Los Gatos. LSI is taking a middle path between Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGAs) that now allow electronics makers to build prototypes of new chips quickly, but expensively, and high-end custom chips called Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that take as much as 18 months to two years to design, but offer huge cost-savings when manufactured in high volume. Marz said that while the competitive imperative was to build chips ever faster and at lower cost, FPGAs, the existing method for doing so, are ineffective for either high-speed connections or low-power usage -- two of the most sought-out features. "LSI is targeting the middle market segment that has emerged as a result of increasing pressure in the industry to create high-density chips faster, more predictably, and at a lower cost," said Jordan Selburn, an analyst at market research company iSupply Corp. LSI's move, which will be heralded in full-page advertisements in big U.S. papers -- an unusual move for a maker of esoteric technology -- will be detailed at a meeting with analysts at the New York Stock Exchange later on Wednesday. Marz said that RapidChip could shave as much as 90 percent off the cost of complex FPGA designs as much as 80 percent from the cost of standard-cell ASIC chips. Jones, who advises major chipmakers across the globe on business strategy, said a customer might expect to spend as little as $200,000 to $500,000 for a RapidChip product. This contrasts with the $3 million to $5 million it can take to build a standard ASIC design and as much as $10 million to $20 million spent on designs for the most intricate circuits sized at 90 nanometers, or 1/1000th the width of a human hair. At such prices, only a handful of large developers can invest the capital necessary to produce new versions of their chips, he said. Companies on the scale of major mobile phone makers building so-called baseband radio chips, as an example. Jones said that companies such as NEC Corp. (Tokyo:6701.T - News) and Texas Instruments (NYSE:TXN - News) have had limited success with their initial efforts to sell platforms for helping customers develop their own specialized chip designs, by comparison. "This is a fundamental enhancement in how customers will do system designs," Jones said of the chip designs that underlie the distinctive features in each new generation of electronic products. "This could give LSI a sustainable lead." RapidChip also could halve the time to around six months that it takes for electronics makers to design chips with new features into customized products, Selburn said. Customers building high-speed network gear, storage devices and consumer electronics such as rewriteable digital video disks are likely to be early adopters, Jones said. The first RapidChip products have begun the design process and will be manufactured early next year using LSI Logic's 0.18 micron and 0.11-micron process technologies at its plant in Gresham, Oregon and at its foundry partners, the company said. State-of-the-art 90 nanometer versions of RapidChip will be available to customers by late 2003. Officials declined to name early customers, but said they had been drawn from some of the $1.8 billion-a-year company's largest existing customers. The company plans to make further details available on its Web site at (http://rapidchip.lsilogic.com). Shares of LSI gave up 5.05 percent to trade at $6.96 on the New York Stock Exchange amid a steep, worldwide sell-off of technology shares on Tuesday. Any opinions on this new product line Cary? RtS