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Technology Stocks : Phoenix Technologies (PTEC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Jules B. Garfunkel who wrote (3129)	2/5/1999 10:49:00 AM
From: Mark Brophy	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 3624

DSP will drive sales of interconnect cores. Besides the kitchen appliances that you mentioned, all sorts of embedded devices are being developed such as medical instrumentation, lab equipment, and GPS apps that will network to the PC via interconnect standards sold by the Phoenix semiconductor IP group. DSP is booming so much that DSP leader TI is building new fabs to meet the demand at a time when the ASIC, DRAM and microprocessor vendors are hunkering down with too much capacity. I'm looking forward to the day when a guitar synthesizer contains a Firewire interface, which will allow me to compose and edit guitar music on my PC. Current guitar synthesizers use a 15 year old interconnect standard called MIDI, which is inadequate for guitars. MIDI was designed for keyboards and the bandwidth is double that of standard RS-232 serial ports that connect a non-USB mouse to a PC. This is sufficient for a keyboard because all the player does is whack one of 88 strings with a hammer using a variable amount of force that determines the volume of the sound. But, a guitar pretending to be a piano has limited usefulness. The guitar is a much richer instrument. You not only control the pitch and volume of a sound, but also the frequency spectrum, which is called the timbre. If you pluck the string closer to the bridge than the sound 4 inches away from the bridge (where the sound hole is located on an acoustic), you get a timbre weighted towards higher frequencies. Plucking the string while the heel of your plucking hand is resting lightly on the strings dampens higher frequencies. You can do something similar with your fretting hand by not pressing down all the way to the neck, or by pressing on the fret rather than the space between frets. As the price of DSP continues to fall, more apps like the guitar synthesizer that rely upon real-time frequency analysis become practical. One of the painters in my wife's gallery recently composed the music for a local ballet production, but he's a guitarist and doesn't play keyboards! The PC and software allowed him to overcome his inability. The advent of the guitar synthesizer will create guitar music composers out of keyboard players. And, guitar players will enjoy the same economies as word processors bring to writers today.