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To: Yiqun Xie who wrote (15215)	8/12/1998 1:10:00 AM
From: Andrew Vance	Respond to of 17305

AV--I am not sure if this is a repeat of a comment by me but you have your finger on a great prospect with LEVL. What makes things interesting is that LEVL did appear on the lists I get from a source for stocks "in play". I tend to agree this is a good one for the upside. Speaking of which - Tech Master - Boy am I embarassed about HELX. This stock should have been in my universe for quite awhile. I always wanted a piece of CTI-Cryogenics and it wasn't until I did the DD on HELX that I discovered CTI-Cryo is a subsidiary. Very fine company and I had no problem buying into today even with the market issues and without knowing the way AMAT was going to report. BTW-interesting conference call. Still gloom and doom for the rest of the year so I am still ocmfortable with my late 1st QTR to 2nd quarter 1999 as the earliest signs of recovery. Another thing is that INTC is the only company talking to AMAT about full production at 0.18u while AMAT gave a weird additional response that they are stilling waiting for the 0.25u production to ramp up. Beats the hell out of me why the 0.35u process never migrated to 0.25u for more cost effective manufacturing. Supposedly the equipment set was going to be transferrable. (Remember INTC saying they could do it without all the DUV and related bells and whistles??) Well, with the massive downturn and Engineers sitting on their butts, one would think a device shrink by the design group, some tweaking by the process group, and a few cleverly purchased reticle set would have put a few foundries or fabs into the 0.25u fullproduction mode. Heck, even the fabless guys could have redesigned or developed 0.25u devices and sent them to the empty foundries for production at the same prices they were paying for the 0.35u process. After all, they had the foundries over a barrel. the foundries already invested in the equipment and they are still not running at capacity. Makes one think there is more here than meets the eye. At face value, the innocuous comment by AMAT today leads me to believe the 0.35u process was not as easy as it was made out to be and that we might see this process leap frogged to 0.18u as soon as we come out of the slump. Andrew