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Technology Stocks : IDTI - an IC Play on Growth Markets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: AJBurl who wrote (7385)	3/16/1998 11:53:00 AM
From: Rob S.	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11555

This could be interesting. It is possible that the tie-up is with IDTI but it could be almost anybody. I know that several of the large Japanese semi/electronics companies have extensive patent cross licenses with Intel but I'm not certain about Toshiba. It's quite possible - that would give IDTI freedom to pursue PII slot 1 clones and be free from any entanglement of an Intel lawsuit. It would also be a big advantage in amassing the needed production and marketing mass. I think that the market and intellectual property (IP) conditions in the electronics industry are in a major period of adjustment. A lot of this is being caused by the successfull challenge to Intel's dominance of the uP business. Other factors include the need for companies to amass the critical IP blocks to do "systems-on-a-chip" which is now becoming very practical from both a design and manufacturing standpoint. An additional major influence is the huge growth and changes caused by the internet. This increases the need for inter-operability and is the defining influence that is driving a merger between the PC and consumer electronics product categories. It also dramatically increases the sped of product development and changes in the industry. The Japanese need to compete in this evolving arena or they will be left on the sidelines. I think these things may cause many corporate heads to look at acquisitions, joint ventures, licensing agreements, and partnerships as being attractive, if not necessary alternatives to developing technology in-house. IDTI has a lot of attractive technologies that are very well positioned to contribute to a Japanese company's thrusts into several markets. That is speculation. Brian B. did say that IDTI was in talks with three major semi companies about an outsourcing agreement for manufacture. He didn't mention any plans to joint venture. IBM, SGS and one company that requested not to be named were said to be involved. IBM has since signed an agreement with AMD which may use up the capacity they had previously allocated to produce Cyrix parts. That makes a deal with IBM a bit less likely. SGS has proven to be a weak partner for Cyrix and would probably not be a great partner for IDTI either (pure speculation). Brian also has said that IDTI has talked to a few OEMs of laptop computers but that IDTI does not have the 250K qty per quarter necessary to enter such an agreement and would be unlikely to have that amount of excess capacity for several months. Toshiba would appear to be a great candidate for the use of the C6 and C6+ in laptops. When (if) the standard C6 is shrunk to 0.25 um, the size and power consumption should make it extremely attractive for low-power applications. The C6+ and possible application specific derivatives would spice up the picture even more. Nice to think about.