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Technology Stocks : IDTI - an IC Play on Growth Markets -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (9056)	7/1/1998 10:29:00 PM
From: kash johal	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 11555

I am bearish on ALTR,XLNX,LSCC at the moment as a matter of fact. Frankly there are much better alternatives to CL. AMI, Chip Express, Orbit and many others offer much better solutions for conversion from a proven design.. The fundamental problem is twofold for CL. The FPGA introduce very agressive geometry devices and upgrade every 12-18 months or so. These devices have very high ASPs and then the prices drop rapidly as production ramps up. It take CL quite a while to reverse engineer each individual part exactly like the ALtera devices, run silicon, verify software etc. So they can only come to market with a limited number of one to one device part numbers. By the time they introduce the device 12-18 months later most of the profit is gone. Just take a look at how old the Altera devices are that CL converts (ie from date of introduction). It's kind of like selling microprocessors that are competitive with what Intel was selling at high margins 2 years ago (sound familiar!) The second major problem is that their device is 50% smaller than the FPGA device ( in the same technology). This sounds great. Except for the fact that IDT is at 0.35 micron---just. Competition is already at 0.25 micron and next year will be at 0.18 micron. So process wise if you are not competitive your ,margins suck. Folks like AMI, Chip express have die sizes that are 5x as small as the FPGA so even in a mature older process they are competitive. I look at IDTI as possibly a golden opporunity if they get their act together. They have already spent the money on the fab and they need to build differentiated products with reasonable margin. They simply cannot be competitive with AMD or National let alone Intel in the CPU wars. They should integrate the WC1 with added functionality and try to focus on different markets: Embedded control, Internet appliances etc. Until they do that these guys are doomed. My opinion as always. Regards, Kash

To: Harold Engstrom who wrote (9056)	7/2/1998 1:25:00 PM
From: Rob S.	Respond to of 11555

Harold pointed out correctly that IDT and CL have expected all along that it would take a couple of years for them to broaden the product families and capture significant market share. I was told not to expect profits from CL until well into next year. There are several advantages to the CL approach besides price. Many designs find Altera programmable stuff to be less than ideal for power consumption and speed - CL's parts over clear performance advantages in those areas.