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Semiconductor Conference Industry appears bullish at semiconductor confab By Craig Matsumoto, EE Times San Francisco -- The Robertson, Stephens & Co. Semiconductors Conference, held here last week, featured presentations from more than 100 companies in the semiconductor, semiconductor-equipment and EDA industries. One of those was the DSP Group Inc., whose chief executive Eli Ayalon told attendees that his firm is looking to acquire a company specializing in video technology. The company, he said, has recovered from its struggles last year and wants to expand. Given its cash reserves of $49 million, an acquisition is an attractive route to take. The video angle was selected partly for its expected size in 2000-big, but not big enough to attract market bullies, Ayalon said. The company has just started looking at possible targets, he added. DSP Group has a licensee for its Palm core, the Pine/Oak follow-up that's in development. CEO Ayalon left only one clue: it's "one of the two largest" ASIC houses in the U.S. Also at the conference, Cirrus Logic Inc. officials said they're pleased with the company's latest turnaround effort. The company was profitable in the June quarter, and chief operating officer Thomas Kelly said he expects gross margins "will float around 38 or 39 percent for the year." The company's next trick: a low-cost digital camera, coming out in March. Tessera Inc. outlined plans for its "wafer-level interconnect," due for introduction later this year. Already known for its micro-ball-grid-array packaging, Tessera believes it can package an entire wafer's worth of chips before dicing. The company licenses out micro-BGA technology, but it's saving the wafer-level work for itself, chief executive John W. Smith said. Graphics boutique Neomagic Inc. already has the follow-up to the high-end MagicGraph 128XD in development. The newer, even higher-end chip has landed design wins despite not being announced, according to chief executive Prakash Agarwal. Mentor Graphics Corp. chief executive Walden Rhines admitted the company's acquisition of Microtec was "performing below expectations." The company "still had a fair number of problems" when acquired and "needs to make a transition to Windows-based products," Rhines said. Separately, Rhines noted that most of Mentor's new products will be internally developed from here on out. On the bright side, the company's Calibre tool secured three design wins last week, and sales of Calibre have doubled in the last six months, he said. It appears that Cypress Semiconductor Corp. has weathered the worst of the SRAM-pricing debacle, chief executive T.J. Rodgers said. The company just finished its fourth-best quarter of bookings ever. "Depending on the luck of the draw, we will have our second or third best quarter [in bookings] this quarter," he said. He also pointed out that Cypress remained profitable during the price declines, more than its SRAM competitors could say. Prices dropped so much that Cypress's revenues are only 44 percent SRAMs. Intel Corp.'s presentation, by vice president Ron Smith, ignored the Chips and Technologies Inc. acquisition, concentrating instead on the company's embedded-products efforts. Smith discussed some of Intel's non-desktop plans for the PC, including the Car PC; one attendee noted afterwards that Intel had tried to organize a Car PC conference for last June but couldn't get enough interest, not even among car companies. Notable absences at the conference included Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Motorola Inc. Texas Instruments Inc. did not present but instead was invited to give a luncheon keynote, delivered by chief executive Thomas Engibous. On the other hand, the major contestants in the 3-D graphics wars were in attendance, including S3 Inc., Trident Microsystems Inc., Neomagic, 3Dfx Interactive Inc. and 3DLabs Inc. Ltd. (Next article.)
[This article comes from EE Times in a joint cooperative effort with the Motley Fool. For more articles like it, please look at Fool's Gold every weekend or simply go to the Fool's Gold Mine and page through our back issues, which all have clever and cool EE Times articles in them.]
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