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

To: w2j2 who wrote (1377)	11/14/1997 5:52:00 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2389

All, ALTR CEO interview - sumnet.com Regards, Don

To: w2j2 who wrote (1377)	11/15/1997 2:06:00 AM
From: Bilow	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2389

My opinion of Altera vs. Xilinx strengths: I think the two companies actually sell to very slightly different marketplaces. Here I am thinking of their leading edge products, not the small stuff that neither makes much margins on. Altera: Best Tools. Quite a bit better than the Xilinx tools, except when you are trying to maximize performance. Xilinx: Lowest Price/Performance. This is only important when you are going for large scale production. So of the two, Altera is the natural choice for prototyping full custom chips. This is a market where the customer cares a little less about how much the chip costs, because he is going to replace it with a cheaper full custom or gate array anyway. It is my opinion that this market is at least half saturated. The reason is that the parts have already achieved a quite high market penetration. Total sales are something proportional to the total number of engineers prototyping systems, and that is a number that doesn't have a lot of growth in it. The only room for growth would be in much larger parts with extremely high prices. Something like a million gates equivalent at a price of $5000 could be very profitable, given the ease of the Altera tool set. This is what I would hope for if I was an Altera stock holder. Xilinx has the lead when it comes to parts used in mass production. This comes from their two advantages: Lower prices and lower level software. The Xilinx low-level software allows a designer to squeeze about 50% more out of the already cheaper silicon than an Altera designer. These are overwhelming advantages for those companies that go into mass production with Xilinx parts. Unfortunately, there really aren't that many such companies. There just aren't too many applications for field programmable gate arrays that can't be replaced with cheaper full custom or gate array parts. One important advantage of full custom parts is that they can include mixed signal parts like converters (A/Ds and D/As), phase locked loops, op amps, filters, etc. I read that Xilinx is working on next generation chips that include these features. I posted a link to a set of field programmable gate array articles for 1997 on the Xilinx web page, link: exchange2000.com In particular: Roelandts also briefly discussed yet another new architecture, planned for 1999 shipment. This architecture would make further extensions, including D/A and A/D converters, built-in logic analysis and a 500-MHz differential I/O scheme. techweb.com Given this, it is conceivable to me that Xilinx could double or even triple their sales. Such parts would be great for all sorts of development work as well. The last project I worked on that used XC4000s had to have the A/D and D/A etc., off chip. I think the possibilities for growth of the two companies are not as high as their stock prices. But if I were forced to accept employee stock options at one of the two companies, I would not hesitate before choosing Xilinx. At least part of the reason is that I think Xilinx has more room for improvement. JMHO. -- Carl