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

To: kas1 who wrote (1651)	3/30/1998 8:02:00 PM
From: Rick Farabaugh	Respond to of 2389

There is a segment of the customer base for both ALTR and XLNX which use their parts to prototype systems. The amount of money made is small in those deals, but everything adds up. The bigger business is in customers who like the tradeoff of slightly more expensive chips with a much quicker time-to-market. There must be something about this in the 10q filings. You might go back through those for both ALTR and XLNX. I agree with your analysis of the networking companies. I would only add that it's possible that they are seeing some softness in their business from Asian customers caught in the monetary squeeze. In that case the orders are probably ones that will be delayed a quarter or 2. The effect might be to trigger their next boom when those orders get back on the books. When that happens, both ALTR and XLNX will benefit. In the meantime this is all already factored into their prices.

To: kas1 who wrote (1651)	3/31/1998 9:36:00 AM
From: nealm	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2389

Speaking from my own experience, the PLDs are most certainly used in production units. These devices represent the "firmware" with a given product that can be upgraded over time. The FPGA to ASIC conversion will probably never be major market because those common functions are already being developed by companies like Cypress or LSI or others, and ALTR/XLNX chips are proprietary anyway. There is an excellent article on FPGAs in the April 1998 issue of Proceedings of the IEEE. The article talks about FPGA evolution and focuses on XLNX SRAM based devices. The XLNX devices are heavily used in coding/decoding application in telecom. If you think telecom is a mature field that only needs commodized chips, look at companies like Yurie Systems (YURI). These companies are finding new ways of implementing networking products using advanced protocals. I'm looking for big sales of ALTR's 0.25um chips in the future and growth from European and North American sales. My guess is it will come later this year. neal