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Technology Stocks : CYRIX / NSM -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AB who wrote (22467)	1/4/1998 10:12:00 PM
From: Yousef	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 33344

AB, Re: "Yousef, Why do you call NSM a technology follower?" There are a couple of reasons that I call NSM a "process technology follower". First, NSM (as you correctly state) is focused primarily on analog processes. This means that they have optimized their processes for parameters like capacitor and resistor linearity, and FET Idsat matching. These are absolutely needed for Analog, but of little use for digital processes. The key parameters in a digital process is to get the highest FET drive current (Idsat) at the lowest voltage. This device technology thens needs to be matched to a high performance interconnect (low resistance and capacitance) process. Thus an analog process is very different from a state-of-the-art digital CPU process. Secondly, I have worked closely with all the SEMATECH member companies. These companies breakdown into basically two "camps". The technology leaders/early adopters and the followers. Intel, Motorola, TI, IBM, even AMD are the technology leaders while NSM, HP, Rockwell, Lucent are the technology followers. This can be seen by the way each company prioritizes the various projects at SEMATECH. Be careful, not all .25um processes are the same ... Intel and AMD have very different .25um technologies. AMD's has been optimized for density/minimum die size while Intel's is optimized for CPU performance. It's not clear where NSM's .25um process will fall relative to Intel and AMD. Make It So, Yousef