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Technology Stocks : LTX Corp. (LTXX) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Greg Thornton who wrote (1314)	8/3/1998 11:19:00 AM
From: Mike Botham	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 2126

Greg, In answer to your question: Catalyst is a mixed signal tester. Teradyne has an entirely separate division that makes purely digital testers. Their digital capabilities are significantly greater than those exhibited in their mixed signal testers. I also agree with your last paragraph. As long a system can test the customers devices, they are likely to stick with their current equipment supplier. Foundries have a tremendous investment in test programs and test engineer training. They're not likely to give that up for some gee-whiz feature in the tester. Since the bulk of today's highly integrated mixed signal devices run at less than 400Mhz and have fewer than 384 digital pins, I don't think Teradyne is likely to lose market share on this round, simply for those reasons. If someone is looking to buy a tester that is truely both a Digital and a Mixed Signal tester, LTX may have an advantage there. Up until now, however, they've been very different test environments. Someone doing VLSI devices doesn't want all the added overhead and expense of Analog pins etc. Someone doing mixed signal doesn't need the expense of having 1Ghz digital pins. I would be surprised to see this really changing anytime soon, but who knows. There's always more to the economic model than meets the eye. I just designed these things. I was never very good at predicting what the customer wanted from a marketing point of view. Fortunately that wasn't my job. Good luck, Mike Botham