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

To: Gary Strike who wrote (208)	2/27/1998 11:43:00 AM
From: lml	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 532

Gary: I read the press release several times, attempting to understand as much of the patent's benefits as possible. Though not experienced in the field of circuit design, my understanding is that its benefits comes into play at extremely low voltages -- those which approximate zero voltage levels. According to the release, circuits that operate at near zero voltages operate at levels where the magnitude of the noise signals produced by the larger threshold transistors begin to impede performance as measured by the circuits' signal-to-noise ratio as well as operational bandwidth. IMP claims its patent minimizes this problem by creating transistors which turn "ON" at near-zero voltage levels, permitting the circuit to operate at voltage levels lower than currently employed without the accompanied performance degradation. Bottom line: the patent claims to be of specific value at ultra low voltages. Thus, any analogous reference to "higher power" circuitry would be directly inconsistent with the benefits asserted by the patent. Regardless of our technical discussion here, the market seems unimpressed. My thinking tells me -- OK, good, so what new market does this create? What products may be improved? Is there a real demand for these ultra low voltage circuits, & if so, who's designing them, & would they have a need for the technology offered by this patent? JMO

To: Gary Strike who wrote (208)	2/27/1998 3:18:00 PM
From: slob	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 532

Gary, The problem is analog at a low supply voltage. For 0.18u CMOS most people are talking about 1.8V supplies heading down to 1.4V in the near future. This is needed to reduce the Power consumption of the digital logic and also because the Gate breakdown voltage is falling along with the channel length. So if your only supply is a 1.8V supply you need to rethink how all your opamp, regulator and modulator cells function. Multiple Vt devices helps you do the codac and voltage regulator stages of a cell phone, however, the real power savings happen in the DSP. At 5V life was easy, you can triple cascode standard 1V+ Vt devices and get some real nice accurate analog circuits. At 3.0 Volts supply you can use the same circuits with some tricks to bias second stages. At below 2.0V you need multiple threshold devices to even try to do good analog. At below 1.5V you need new circuit topologies and design methods. Slob