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Technology Stocks : Qualcomm Moderated Thread - please read rules before posting -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jeff Vayda who wrote (54167)	8/4/2006 12:40:15 PM
From: slacker711	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 197246

Did the Q put too much into the fab houses they selected to get the process right and to downsize at the same time (of their own accord?) If I am a fab house, I am not going to be pushing the envelope too much. If I am running at a profitable pace, the last thing I want to do is mess up the works with an unproven processes. I would take a chance at alienating both present and potential business. I havent followed the process technology transitions by TSMC/UMC very closely (prior to the 65nm), but I am guessing that a major customer needs to show interest if they are going to really try and push the envelope. I dont think that Qualcomm did this for the 90nm node (per Jha's statement) but things look to have changed in 65nm. It is actually a two-fold commitment on Qualcomm's part though. They need to get TSMC (or Samsung/UMC) to close the manufacturing gap with TI and they need to redesign their chipsets for the new technology node. It is hard to get an exact count, but I think that Qualcomm planned to begin sampling 4 or 5 different new 90nm baseband chipsets in all of last year. In contrast, they began sampling 4 new 65nm designs during the 2nd quarter of this year alone....and have quite a few other chipsets on their near-term roadmap. Personally, I'm not sure if Q can get much closer than six months behind the process leaders when it comes to linewidths. TI and Intel (and others with fabs) tend to do much of the R&D and debugging when it comes to the transitions. I think that a six month gap might just be the price Q has to pay for being fabless. Slacker