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

To: Smilodon who wrote (125)	4/26/1998 5:14:00 PM
From: Mark Bracey	Respond to of 134

Sorry for the delay. Been out most of the weekend. The real question is, how are they going to make up the revenue shortfall with customers going away from their legacy emulator debugger products. Debug is the name of the game in embedded systems, so don't accept CodeTest as a way to make up the difference. (As I stated earlier, emulators are going away and are being replaced with similar capability built right into the silicon.) Don't accept the Metrowerks IDE that they have adopted as a solution either. They still don't have the hardware assist that the customers want so simply adding this software will not be the answer. There are too many players which support all the rest of the on chip debuggers for them to make a difference. Metrowerks was originally a MAC OS based development product and had plans to take over the embedded world with a price of about $795 for their product (vs $2500-$3500 for the competition). They recently raised their prices as they found their wasn't enough business to compete and stay profitable at those low prices. Which is another problem. With everyone and their brother reselling every body elses products (typically at a 50 percent margin), it doesnt leave a lot of profit left over to appear profitable to investors. More info... A competitor, EST, has produced a low end/ low price product which takes advantage of this on chip debugging, but have designed it in such a way that it is scalable. Meaning, you start out with a $3500 product, and by adding additional (hardware) modules, you can work your way up to a $25,000 product with 99 percent of the capability of a traditional emulator. In this one product they have combined the on chip debugging with what is a traditional logic state analyzer. Nice, small, and compact. As I have also indicated, Hewlett-Packard has gotten out of the traditional emulator business all together. They use a similar idea as EST, except the hardware which supports the on chip debugging and the logic analyzer are separate units. Not quite so compact as the EST, but will support a wider range of processors. I don't think Applied has anything to compete with these right now.