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

To: DWB who wrote (11334)	3/31/1998 10:42:00 AM
From: All Mtn Ski	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

Sony News: Hitachi Ltd said on Tuesday it had signed an agreement under which Sony Corp will use Hitachi central processing units (CPU) to develop and produce large-scale integrated circuits (LSI). Using Hitachi's SuperH SH-1, SH-3 SH-DSP CPU cores, Sony plans to develop, produce and market its own LSIs. Hitachi will also support Sony's production of the LSIs, a Hitachi spokesman said. Hitachi's SuperH series of high-performance microprocessors are used extensively in multimedia applications such as mobile information and communication devices, car navigation systems and digital cameras, Hitachi said. Sony will use them in products such as digital cameras, laptop computers and some other devices in which Sony wants to reduce power consumption, a Sony spokesman said. Hitachi said it had already concluded agreements with VLSI Technology Inc <VLSI.O>, SGS-Thomson Microelectronics NV <STM.PA> and Seiko Epson Corp of Japan on use of the SuperH microprocessors. infobeat.com Tom

To: DWB who wrote (11334)	3/31/1998 10:44:00 AM
From: Grand Poobah	Respond to of 25814

<<I'm now wondering if LSI could find a market for a single chip controller and decoder?>> I'm sure they could. Other things being equal, there is always a strong preference for the integrated solution. It always takes less board space and generally costs less. The question I would ask is whether they have the expertise to make the disk controller portion of the chip. <<Anyone know if their recently announced G12 process could handle something like this?>> It ought to be able to without a problem. The CRUS and Oak chips are made in 0.35-micron processes. LSI's G12 is 0.18-micron and therefore should be able to make the same chips in about a quarter of the size. So even if they double the size of the chip by combining the two, the advantage you gain by going from 0.35 to 0.18-micron makes the resultant chip half the size. The number of transistors should not be a problem since G12 handles some unbelievable number of millions of transistors. I would guess an integrated DVD controller-decoder would be on the order of 4 million transistors or less. The design of such a highly integrated chip would be harder than the fabrication. Packaging such a chip might be more of a problem than the fabrication, too. The CRUS controller is a 208-pin chip. The Oak controller is a two-chip set, a 128-pin controller plus a DSP. The Oak decoder is a 160-pin chip. I don't know how many pins LSI's decoder has, but I suspect it is similar. If you add the two chips together, you get about 350 pins. At this point, flip-chip packaging starts to become desirable, since you are probably going to be wasting real estate on the silicon if you are using a 0.18-um design and trying to bond out 350 pins from the perimeter of the die. I wouldn't look for an integrated controller-decoder from LSI anytime soon, but I do believe their fabrication and packaging technology could support something at that level at the present time. G.P.