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Politics : Formerly About Applied Materials -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Fred Levine who wrote (25766)	10/26/1998 9:39:00 PM
From: Katherine Derbyshire	Respond to of 70976

I would say a chip design exchange would have little if any immediate impact on AMAT. For the longer term, it's probably good. Easier access to designs means lower barriers to entry for new design shops, which means more new products coming to market, more total square inches of silicon being manufactured, and therefore more need for AMAT's equipment. The more immediate impact would be on semiconductor foundries, which would reap huge benefits (and which are already doing this sort of thing on a smaller scale by licensing IP libraries for their customers to use). The big integrated manufacturers (Intel, Motorola, etc) would be forced to move even further out on the leading edge, since that's the only place where having design and process under one roof really helps. Chip prices overall would probably come down, due to increased competition. Katherine