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Technology Stocks : Dupont Photomasks (DPMI) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Rob-Chemist who wrote (725)	11/16/1998 1:26:00 AM
From: Duane L. Olson	Respond to of 955

Rob...Touche!... Exactly the point... When conditions are most difficult in the industry is precisely when it is most urgent to move on to provide product which offers a competitive advantage. Note that when an ASIC fab (eg, LSI Logic, Gresham, OR) goes in, you see the mask producer (ie, DPMI in the Gresham case) going in with not only a .25u capability, but also prebuilding to accommodate .18u. The evidence appears to indicate an intent to support a fairly rapid move to the tighter design rules.. Where the Asian companies were able (eg, Taiwan), they certainly have moved to match, or exceed the chip shrinkage of (for example) MU... where they could not, they are selling out to the companies with deeper pockets. The drive, however, certainly seems to be toward a very rapid move to the narrower design rules..even if there is, and will be, an excess of capacity in (say) .35u fabs... TSO