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

To: Barry who wrote (11984)	4/29/1998 2:10:00 AM
From: shane forbes	Respond to of 25814

Hmmm.... Barry I think we have to tweak some of those evil thoughts of yours. Here goes: (1) I am rooting for bay in the same manner I hoped apple would eventually topple the microsoft monster Well I have ASND so go figure! (2) it also seems to me that the number of chips required for each piece of equipment is declining even as more hardware is being sold As far as the number of chips going down I agree but note that this plays straight into LSI's strengths since they typically do with one chip what normally would require 2, 3 or 4. So they are in effect throwing some of the commodity makers out of business. The single chip argument also brings down the price of the overall customer's product and that's a good thing. The actual chip "content" ($ value not number) per device is going up I think - certainly with consumer electronics and that to me is where the emphasis of this argument is for LSI. (3) For LSI's sake, I certainly hope their chips are/remain proprietary in nature; learned painfully what can happen when a property becomes a commodity thanks to atmel and flash memory & s3 and video chips. LSI learnt the same in 1991-1992. Flash memory and video chips are totally different from the kind of single specialized chips that LSI makes for each of their customers. To wit atmel has part a8900 for such and such flash density blah blah blah. Can check a catalog and place an order. No such luck with LSI I think. There is a lot of specialization with each chip. Ideally what would happen I guess is that the customer's engineers and LSI's design the chips together and LSI then gets the fabs going. With the cell library they now have this is a bit easier but each chip is pretty much unique. So commoditization is not easy (at least for the next few years). And I see no such indication yet. Too early. That's the beauty of this. Things like networking are areas where we have just begun to use LSI's expertise. Again too early to commodotize a new born. Over time sure competition will prove to be a real pain - this is the semiconductor industry after all. But a bit too early in my mind at this stage of the game. ---- One is only as good as one's R&D and next design win. I don't see too many companies out there with the breadth of design wins that LSI has. Finally the most important thing i/t is product cycles and LSI has a lot of them ready to ramp. Perhaps the result of the fat R&D budgets of the last 2 years. When that past R&D becomes high volume fab. utilization in the next 2-3 years, the oil-well starts gushing... ---- Shane.