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

To: John Rieman who wrote (32067)	4/9/1998 7:00:00 PM
From: DiViT	Read Replies (3) \| Respond to of 50808

Like that matters to this dog.... I'm on vacation as of tomorrow. Taking advantage of the kids spring break. Going to leave my laptop at home and try not to think computers for a change. I might get on line, if I find that one of my relatives has a computer, to feed my SI addiction. If I don't get back on tonight, I'll see you all on the other side of $20 in a week or so.

To: John Rieman who wrote (32067)	4/9/1998 10:29:00 PM
From: BillyG	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 50808

GI settop box news. GI is licensing its MPEG-2 technology to Broadcom, and it will buy 100% of its settop chips from Broadcom in 1998. After 1998, GI has the option to purchase some chips from others........ techweb.cmp.com <<GI has not disclosed exactly how it intends to partition the functions inside the DCT-5000 box. Broadcom, however, appears to have an inside track. Currently in registration to go public, Broadcom has disclosed in its filing to the SEC that it issued and sold 1,500,000 shares to GI for $22.7 million in September. In connection with that financing, GI and Broadcom entered a development, supply and licensing agreement under which GI granted Broadcom royalty-bearing, nonexclusive, worldwide license to use its MPEG and related technology. Broadcom, for its part, agreed to develop ICs for GI's digital cable set-top boxes and to supply the chips to GI for four years. According to the SEC filing, GI agreed to purchase from Broadcom 100 percent of all the chips (except for the CPU and memory) required for set-tops that GI will ship in 1998. Those chips involve transmission, communications and video decompression (MPEG) functions. The percentage of product requirements that GI must purchase from Broadcom, however, declines each year over the term of the agreement, to 45 percent in 2001. Having gotten access to MPEG technology from GI, Broadcom has been quietly expanding into the graphics area to move closer to its ambitious goal of a single-chip set-top solution. According to Nicholas, Broadcom late last fall snatched up a small graphics-chip firm called Azuron Systems (San Jose), a spin-off of interactive-TV-platform company PowerTV Inc. (Cupertino, Calif.). Headed by Sandy MacInnis, a former vice president of hardware development at PowerTV, Azuron has been working on a new graphics-chip technology for the TV platform. Since working at Kaleida in early 1990s and later at PowerTV, MacInnis has been instrumental in the design of advanced ASICs capable of compositing graphics with video, digital video scaling, alpha blending and anti-aliasing of graphics and video. As employees of Broadcom, MacInnis and his Azuron team are "designing from the ground up a new graphics chip that Sandy has always wanted to design," said Nicholas. Broadcom remains confident of mid-1999 delivery of a single-chip set-top solution incorporating its cable modem and QAM receiver, an MPEG audio/video/transport decoder originally developed by GI and an advanced graphics engine to be developed by the former Azuron team.>>