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

To: bill c. who wrote (8278)	12/14/1997 9:14:00 PM
From: bill c.	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21342

[ Bookmark this site ] Table of Contents What is DSL? Find out why DSL and cable are the only two viable plans for bandwidth freedom in works..... zdnet.com

To: bill c. who wrote (8278)	12/14/1997 9:30:00 PM
From: bill c.	Respond to of 21342

[ MOT CopperGold Talk ] .....The TI move would seem to be bad news for Motorola Semiconductor, which held a strong early position in ADSL chip technology, having licensed Amati's ADSL patents well ahead of the rest of the industry and begun work on an ambitious Application Specific Integrated Circuit approach to ADSL. Not so, says Debbie Sallee, strategic marketing manager of broadband operations at Motorola. "Basically, it looks to us like TI has purchased Amati for cash, and because they believe the same thing we do -- this is going to be a huge market," she says. "We see this as a defensive move by TI." Motorola's CopperGold chip set is in prototype stage with samples expected by the end of the year. Sallee admits there have been delays but says Motorola has kept to the schedule it announced in July. She says CopperGold will compete with any general-purpose digital signal processor (DSP) solution that TI may design, particularly in price and power consumption. "Our solution is a DSP inside of a chip which has peripherals on it that off-load some of the processing capability," Sallee says. Systems built on the CopperGold solution could have some of the upgradability of DSP-based solutions if they include flash memory in the modem board, she adds. "You are not going to have the flexibility you get with a general-purpose DSP, but a DSP comes with a penalty of cost and power consumption," Sallee says. She says some of the sudden activity to sign up new partners reflects the stage of market maturity -- as real deployment grows closer, customers naturally look for multiple suppliers. Briere says, however, that the TI move may reverberate through the industry and cause multiple players to re-examine where they are headed. The good news, he adds, is that TI's actions "obviously validate how huge this market will be -- they paid $400 million for the technology, and you'd have to sell a lot of units just to recap $400 million," he says. "TI sees this as a $6 billion opportunity." zdnet.com

To: bill c. who wrote (8278)	12/14/1997 9:46:00 PM
From: bill c.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 21342

[ TI/Westell/AMTX ] ...When last we left the Digital Subscriber Line community, there was an impending marriage between two long-term characters, Amati Communications Corp. and Westell Technologies Inc. As with all good soap operas, however, "Days of Our XDSL" found the pair split apart even as they were halfway down the aisle, as Amati's eyes strayed to the taller, much wealthier suitor in cowboy boots who -- in an ironic twist -- turned out to be Westell's best friend, Texas Instruments Inc... A Large Shadow TI's move into the xDSL industry is likely to be viewed as the single biggest event of the turbulent autumn. The Texas giant announced on Nov. 19 that it will pay $395 million in cash to acquire Amati, the San Jose-based company that developed Discrete Multitone (DMT) modulation for ADSL and still holds key intelligent property. TI's $20 per share offer outshone the Westell stock swap plan by $3 to $5 per share, depending on where Westell's stock was on a given day. Westell Chairman Gary Seamens saw the handwriting on the wall in a couple of ways. First, he says, it was obvious TI was in a better position to acquire Amati and would likely win any bidding war that might develop. Second, he told a phone conference of analysts, Westell is very attracted to the notion of a digital signal processor (DSP)-based solution for ADSL and was happy to form a strategic alliance with TI, which gives the Aurora, Ill.-based Westell (www.westell.com) access to standards-based DMT solutions that it can then incorporate into its ADSL systems. "There's no question we would have gained intellectual property ownership," says Seamens, who had trumpeted those very benefits weeks earlier in announcing the Amati (www.amati.com) buy. "But there will not be proprietary solutions in this market. And while the fact you own the intellectual property can give you access to licensing royalties, that's not the home run for Westell. To be prevented from having access to [intellectual property] would not be a good thing. Our strategic alliance with TI gives us what we need." Rob Faw, president of Westell, says the company actually contacted TI two years ago to determine its interest in developing a DSP-based solution for ADSL but found TI was just E H starting to look at xDSL. "Now that we have seen their focus and the capabilities, we've become convinced for a lot of reasons that a DSP approach makes more sense than an ASIC approach," he says. For example, the evolving standards are hard to capture in a "hard-wired" ASIC approach, Faw says. "Interoperability is another key issue. It's easier to accomplish if the vendors can make the adjustments through software at the Layer 1 level and not have to change their chip set," he adds. According to James Collinge, access marketing manager for TI, the DSP approach also holds benefits for service providers, in that systems can be developed to support multiple customers that are at different service levels and even support dynamic changing of service levels on a per-customer basis. "If I'm a customer that is usually happy with a 56K [kilobit-per-second] modem, but on one day a week, I need to download a major file and want to do that at higher speeds, my service provider could let me upgrade for that day and would be able to bill me accordingly," he says. Finally, Faw says, DSP holds the promise of being able to upgrade the xDSL system from one flavor to another -- a capability that has become more important as the versions of xDSL have proliferated. With a DSP able to handle 1.6 billion MIPS -- or million instructions per second -- as the TI TMF320C6X can, there is even the possibility of a DSP powerful enough to support both modulation codes currently used for ADSL -- DMT and Carrierless Amplitude Phase modulation. "From an engineering standpoint you could do it," says Collinge. There is a strong chance, says TeleChoice Inc. President Daniel Briere, that TI's move could have major repercussions for the ASIC-based players, including Alcatel Network Systems Inc., with its internal chip source, Alcatel Mitec; Analog Devices Inc., with partner Aware Inc.; Motorola; and Orckit Communications Inc. TI will continue to market its DSP solutions to other vendors and to work with 3Com Corp. to develop technology that bridges today's X2 56-Kbps modems and tomorrow's xDSL technology, Collinge says. "That's fine with us; in fact we want them to sell to other companies," Westell's Seamens says. "That's how this industry is going to grow. We plan to be first to market with a low-cost standards-based solution."..... zdnet.com