Answers About Diversified Products

The recent downturn in the personal computer SRAM marketplace underscores the danger of depending too much on a single product line. Fortunately for Alliance, we had begun development of our DRAM, Flash memory and MMUI products. well before the SRAM slowdown. As we move forward with a more balanced product portfolio, each of our new product lines is now in place to begin contributing to our overall revenues.

Alliance's DRAM, Flash and MMUI products are based on the same design methodologies and process and manufacturing technologies as our SRAM products. Moving forward into these new areas was a logical step to build on our expertise and broaden the reach of our technology. In addition, being in a position to suply a variety of product types to our customers provides Alliance with important leverage and increasingly strategic customer/supplier relationships. Many of our customers, in fact, prefer to do business with a supplier who can meet a variety of their product and technology needs.

Because Alliance's design modules include all of the major components of a complete memory circuit and are scalable in size, we've been able to significantly shorten the design cycles associated with many of our new products. Along with speeding time to market, this strategy enables us to maximize the performance, yield and cost advantages of our basic designs and sustain them over time in future generations of products.

In the fast SRAM product area, we've successfully ramped up volume production and sales of 1 Megabit (Mb) density, placing us on the leading edge of SRAM design. In addition, we're currently developing 2-Mb synchronous pipeline burst and 4-Mb asynchronous SRAMs both of which we anticipate should be ready for introduction in fiscal 1997 in conjunction with the market's expected migration to these higher levels of SRAM density.

In our new product lines, Alliance is in production of a 4-Mb DRAM and has achieved working silicon for a high-speed 16-Mb DRAM that we anticipate should go into volume production this year. Our 1-Mb Flash memory entered the marketplace in fiscal 1996, and we're currently developing 2- and 4-Mb Flash memory products. In addition, Alliance's ProMotion® line of MMUI accelerators made important inroads into the market during the past year, as illustrated by NEC's decision to use our ProMotion accelerators in certain of its business and multimedia PCs. All of these new product introductions and ongoing development efforts place Alliance in a position to take advantage of numerous market opportunities moving forward.