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

To: E. Graphs who wrote (14760)	9/4/1998 2:49:00 PM
From: shane forbes	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 25814

E: All of this reminds me of the times when America used to make clothing locally! Now all of the manufacturing is overseas while the designs tend to be here. Will the same thing happen to chip manufacturing? Clearly sewing a tassel is not the same thing as manufacturing a chip but nevertheless note that the simpler processes have migrated overseas - DRAM being a good example over the last few years. (INTC used to do DRAM in the last decade.) Packaging is likewise done a lot in the far east. But MPUs for instance still have a lot of IP involved and require a lot of expertise (intelligence) so it is not easy to duplicate overseas cheaply. So INTC dominates. Likewise with analog designs and engineering. And that's why companies like ADI, MXIM and LLTC have fat margins and why we don't hear any Taiwan companies wanting to get into MPUs and analog. So where does that leave the SOC concept. First for anyone else's benefit I should add that SOC is not a type of chip like DRAM etc! It is a design methodology intended to take advantage of the fact that you can now put an immense number of intelligence on a single chip. But Just because everything wants to design chips using SOC does not make it a commodity. By way of comparison in software design OOD (object oriented design) is the new wave. Everyone wants to use OOD to build components. Yet this does not mean OOD is a commodity! It just means it is a successful methodology and likewise all this thing about SOC being a commodity is quite senseless to me - all it means is that SOC is the wave of the future and LSI is there among the first of anyone else. There are many ways to build components using OOP and one would hope that over the next few years there will be many ways to build systems on chips. One way won't dominate at least near term. Finally in the same way that OOD in software engineering will extend the domain of applicability far beyond anything we have today, SOC design principles will extend the number of possible designs and the usefulness of chips way way exponentially in the next few years. That should mean enough of business I hope... We live in interesting times...