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Technology Stocks : Trimble Navigation -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Yin Shih who wrote (2331)	3/13/1998 7:16:00 PM
From: Yin Shih	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3506

A couple of quick corrections: 1) The Trimble link is: trimble.com (That extra "l" on the end hurts) 2) In my first read through of the SGS-Thomson announcement I missed the comment about integrated masked ROM and SRAM. This does save two more chips that are commonly needed by the Sierra chipset. But I'm not sure that integration is a plus in all cases. Masked ROM tends to require high-volume applications and does not support field revisions to firmware as does EEPROM which can be a substantial benefit. In large volume with plastic packages, chip costs are almost directly proportional to silicon area used; so unwanted memory that is included can increase cost unnecessarily. Silicon area devoted to unused Masked ROM costs $ and silicon area devoted to unused SRAM costs $ and power. On the other hand an application which does need most of the memory that has been designed into the chipset saves unnecessary packages which costs board area and package $. The end result is that it depends on the application and in any case there is still the perpetual leap-frogging. Plus there's the issue of how good the signal processing and firmware is, an unknown at this time. Certainly further competition to keep TRMB on its toes.