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Technology Stocks : Actel [ACTL] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: CJ who wrote (465)	1/8/1998 3:21:00 PM
From: Larry J.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 674

CJ (and William), as a matter of fact, I just hung up with one of my old cronies that still sells the line. I learned the following: Actel's MX family is being very well received by engineers due to its high speed / density, low cost vs. the competitive ALTR family of products (FLEX 6K). Actel is winning "sockets". Apparently the MX family is a good alternative to ASIC's. He did not have any specific information on how the quarter ended, but did add that apparently Q3's miss was due in part to a significant shipment of mil. spec. product not getting out. He thought it was approx. $6 million in revenue. This will be counted in Q4. In my earlier post, I had indicated that I would like to see ACTL get into SRAM based (reprogrammable) devices. This is the "sweet spot" of the market, and is the technology that ALTR and XLNX employ. It sounds like ACTL does/will have parts that are re-programmable, but it doesn't sound like this is making much of an impact yet. However, like anything else, there are trade-offs (anti-fuse vs. SRAM). There are many many applications where reprogrammability is not a factor, and where anti-fuse is actually better suited due to speed, density and cost considerations. (Cost per gate is cheaper w anti-fuse). Actel is the bonified leader in this technology. The only other vendor is Quicklogic, and they are a very distant second. In fact, Actel has won a law suit against Quicklogic for patent infringement. As it turns out my buddy is an ACTL shareholder as well and felt (as do we), that it is a good value at current prices. Last I checked, looks like we're moving back towards $12. Hope this helps. Larry

To: CJ who wrote (465)	1/8/1998 3:50:00 PM
From: William Grady	Respond to of 674

CJ, a while back Actel did a cross licensing deal with Xilinx when Xilinx wanted to start making devices using the anti-fuse technology that Actel developed; in return Actel got to use some of the SRAM technology that Xilinx developed. I think Actel got the better end of the deal as Xilinx spent a lot of money developing and marketing anti-fuse devices only later deciding to stop making them leaving Actel as the only maker of anti-fuse devices. I believe Actel used the licences that got from Xilinx to develope their new line of SPGA devices which are not anti-fuse; this is an important developement in that they can be reprogramed many times while Actel's other anti-fuse devices can only be programed once. If Actel's SPGA devices can compete with similar devices from Xilinx and Altera they should do very well. If any engineers out there have experience with these devices your comments would be greatlt appreciated.