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To: Trey McAtee who wrote (15732)	4/12/1999 4:07:00 PM
From: Frank Ferrari	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 21342

from briefing.com 13:55 ET****** AWARE (AWRE) 77 1/2 +12 5/8 Briefing.com first became aware of Aware at the AEA Conference back in November. We wrote positively about it at the time, in our Stock Brief of Nov. 10, 1998, when it was trading at $15 a share. It has been a fantastic six months for the little company with 86 employees. Aware is about the purest play on DSL technology that you can find. Aware designs and licenses the logic inside DSL chips, but it neither manufactures nor sells chips. All of its revenue is derived from licenses to DSL chip manufacturers. It's largest client had been Lucent Technologies, but today Bloomberg News reported that Bell Atlantic (BEL) has signed a deal with Northern Telecom (NT) to buy more than $600 million of DSL technology as it rolls out xDSL services to the East Coast. Northern Telecom's technology uses the Aware designs, and therefore Aware will be paid royalties on every chip in each box sold. Aware is a great way to play the coming DSL advance because they have none of the financial burdens associated with hardware manufacturing, such as plant development costs or inventory worries, giving them a much higher gross margin. This means that although revenues may be smaller, net profits could be just as much as a chip company ten times the size. The risk with Aware has always been that, as a small player, their designs will be made obsolete by a larger player, even if the technology is inferior. But with a broadening of the client base, and major players like Bell Atlantic making such a large commitment to Aware based technology, that risk gets smaller. Once established, which today's action is a confirmation of, Aware stands to ride a royalty wave if DSL takes off. Other big action in the DSL arena today: Covad (COVAD) signed a deal with PSINet (PSIX) to provide DSL technology, and with Frontline Communications , another ISP. COVAD trading at 106 9/16 +25 1/16.