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

To: Duane L. Olson who wrote (10171)	2/26/1998 12:50:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 25814

TSO: Here's more fictional stuff... SOC means designing an entire system with millions upon millions of gates and oodles of memory, testing it and then putting the whole shebang in one place - a single chip. --- What enables this? Naively, (a) A library of Cores (and lordy knows LSI must have lots of cores) (b) Some logical way of putting all these cores together thereby producing a useful thing-a-ma-gig which we shall call a SOC (and we'll lay the blame on the EDA people for some of the problems LSI has been having here with these designs.) (c) Some physical way of transforming the logical design into a working wunderchip. Some small physical space where the pieces can all be assembled in a nice cohesive functioning System on a Chip. --- (a) we have, (b) is progressing. (c) is the Si. What LSI can put on each sliver of silicon is driven by how small their process technology is. When 0.38 came out LSI was saying okay the SOC is born - 500k gates. Then 0.25 with I forget how many gates - maybe 5,000k gates. Now LSI is at G11 with 8,000k gates. When G11 came out I rememeber the press reports and LSI ballyhooing that the era of the true SOC has arrived. --- So if all of a sudden you can do 0.08u stuff, it would seem to me that all of a sudden LSI can put a lot more things on that piece of silicon. Ergo that means now we can minitiarize whole PCs on a chip (just joking). Well not only that the price/chip just went down dramatically. Power usage as well. (Of course I'm gently glossing over difficulties in (a) or (b).) And remember I bet these ratios are much better behaved than linear - that is if I shrink by 50% I would guess many of the things go down much faster - maybe squared, maybe better. (wild guess) Best part of all no longer does LSI have to spend 500 million on new litho- equipment (a third of a new fab is litho I think). That means those cap exp just went down. --- Down side lots of chips will be produced cheaply. What if unit demand is not there? Always a possibility. But we can hope that cheaper chips would mean many more uses which would absorb some of the excessive chips. Besides LSI's Holy Grail is to do 1 design and then make 20 million chips not 20 designs and 100,000 chips. --- With ubiquitous chips, esp. in the consumer area, the lure of cheaper cap. exp. and the real possibility of very fine widths, LSI could really be turning out millions of entire Systems on chips very soon. With IP [(a)] LSI has the intellectual capacity. Unfortunately logical [(b)] problem is a big bugaboo - how the heck do you design these things. Nevertheless with the 0.08 stuff, at the very least LSI has a better picture of what the third leg of the stool looks like!