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Technology Stocks : Actel [ACTL] -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: William Grady who wrote (524)	4/4/1998 10:40:00 AM
From: Ken Muller	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 674

William: Just a few comments from someone whose been in the business of selling Actel (not currently however) IMO, The sales arm part of this company has always done a fine job of pushing the product. Actel's weak point has always been their operations organization. Product has always been late, out of stock, wrong die revision, not compatible with latest software releases, etc. An unreasonable amount of horror stories even for a small FPGA company. The problems have gone on since the company's inception and continue today, seemingly uncorrectable. They have held their own in the FPGA market but SPGA appears to be about a year behind schedule. In the meantime, Xilinx and Altera have penetrated almost every conceivable design center. Engineers now routinely specify reprogrammability; officially because of possible field upgrades. Unofficially, they don't want their managers to see how many times they are reprogramming their designs to fix problems. (This is a big political problem) So while the space and military segments will offer some base level profitable business, Actel needs SPGA just to stay in the market. Will the stock double? Maybe. Will it drop to 7? Maybe. Hope that helps in making your investment decisions :--) Good luck, Ken