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Technology Stocks : Newbridge Networks -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Doug who wrote (11185)	5/5/1999 9:14:00 PM
From: gbh	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18016

Multi vendor philosophy has to be introduced at the design stage. Doug, how does one second source a custom 40Gb/s switch fabric ASIC? How about a PMC Sierra Quad T3 Framer? Or a Vitesse Semiconductor 622Mb/s transceiver? Alternately ,R& D done in isolation often leads to the scenarios you describe. This isn't a PC motherboard. This is bleeding edge high speed communications hardware. Quite different animals, having nothing to do with isolation.

To: Doug who wrote (11185)	5/6/1999 1:22:00 AM
From: Thomas Scharf	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 18016

Multi vendor sourcing of many electronic parts is simply impossible in today's world. Even non-custom chips are usually single sourced. For example, even Cisco is single sourced on the Field Programmable Gate Arrays (FPGA's) it buys from both Xilinx and Altera (the parts have similar funtion but are not interchangable) and believe me, they use lots of them. The days of building products out of ssi & msi logic parts that are available from multiple vendors are long gone. That's part of the trade-off of getting more powerful chips. Those same chips are what make complex products like switches & routers technically and economically possible.

To: Doug who wrote (11185)	5/6/1999 2:50:00 PM
From: Win-Lose-Draw	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 18016

gbh: Multi vendor philosophy has to be introduced at the design stage. That works if you're building PCs. It doesn't work so well if you're building something that no one else has built before. No doubt NN can do a better job than it is doing, but for things like the ASICs at the core of the system, whether they are in-sourced or out-sourced they will almost certainly by single-source. Again, not saying you're wrong, just that it can only be taken so far when you're building leading-edge hardware.