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Technology Stocks : Altera -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Ken Muller who wrote (1363)	11/1/1997 6:38:00 PM
From: Bill Martin	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 2389

Re: A semi buyer today can get a FPGA conversion quote from a half dozen suppliers in 48 hours. A conversion can be done in 21 days (prototypes). I have seen buyers read the quote right off the RFQ sheet to the FPGA salesman(usually $3-$6). At one point ALTR themselves were pushing this type of FPGA to ASIC conversion when you had a design with growing volumes. Do you know if they've been successful with this against the pure ASIC vendors? Were they just selling a mask programmed version of your design on the same base silicon, or was it a "redesign" down to a smaller chip that only had the circuits your design requires? Also do you know what the NRE charges are do do this conversion? Put another way, do you know how many chips you need to buy to break even between the cost of the ALTR FPGA and a cheaper ASIC conversion? Thanks. Bill