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Technology Stocks : IMPX - When Will the Dead Money Awaken? -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Sheldon C. who wrote (203)	2/25/1998 2:30:00 PM
From: lml	Respond to of 532

"Is this worth anything?" A patent is only worth the market the holder of the patent is successful at exploiting. As with any technology, I refer to the borrowed adage "its marketing, stupid." Today, having good technology is not enough. It is merely a prerequisite for success. Success can only be achieved by identifying that customer who can benefit from the particular technology, then convincing that customer to buy it at a price that returns a decent rate of return to those that have invested in the technology, the shareholders. The threshold issue, therefore is, is there a sizeable market for this technology, & if so, how much is the potential customer willing to pay for it. The larger the market, the lower the price required to meet investors' minimal rate of return. As for the merits of this patent, I don't know. Right now the market does not seem impressed. Perhaps someone closer to this technology & its possible applications could comment.

To: Sheldon C. who wrote (203)	2/25/1998 7:42:00 PM
From: slob	Respond to of 532

Sheldon, Interesting but IMHO not worth much. The problem with patents like this one is that they are very difficult to enforce. Just to prove that someone is violating your patent you have to reverse engineer their part and process. This is expensive and not something that you would do unless you wanted to force a competitor out of a socket. I don't think that IMPX has any sockets or designs where they would be interested in enforcing a patent. From a technology point lots of people have low Vt (0.2 - 0.3V) devices that are typically used in cascoded amp and regulator stages especially for low voltage applications, for the most part these devices are being used to enable standard 5V analog amp and regulator circuits to function at around 2V. Once you start looking at analog in sub 2.0V applications you need to change over to current mode circuits so the value of the low Vt's is minimal anyway. Just my thoughts Slob

To: Sheldon C. who wrote (203)	2/26/1998 11:07:00 AM
From: slob	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 532

Sheldon, For their foundry business this patent is valuable. Originally I was thinking about them trying to use this against SGS and Ti and some of the other big analog CMOS houses, there it is useless. However, as the voltage drops Foundries are starting to look at Low Vt for Mixed signal applications. If IMPX can get a royalty from Orbit or IC-Works or even maybe TSMC than this could be a very valuable patent. Slob