Date: 18/12/2008

Growing set top box IC market in India

India is important and growing market for Set Top Box (STB) ICs. Market researcher Instat says, by 2012, India's pay-TV market is expected to reach 90 million subscribers. Though imports constitute major share of set-top boxes, due to government's incentives to encourage Indian companies to manufacture them, the demand for STB ICs and other components will considerably increase. It can be estimated in the range of >1.0 billion US$ worth of market for STB ICs by year 2012.

The semiconductor companies actively involved in selling STB devices in Indian market are ST Microelectronics, National Semiconductor, NXP and Broadcom. Tensilica is another fables firm with STB device offerings.
The STM 5107 from ST Microelectronics is fully developed at ST's India Design Centre.
National has sold geode processor based STB solutions to some key customers in India.
Just few days back Bharti Airtel has selected Broadcom's satellite set-top box (STB) system-on-a-chip (SoC) solutions to power its direct-to-home (DTH) TV services - Airtel digital TV. The Broadcom BCM7454 standard definition satellite STB SoC and the Broadcom BCM4505 satellite front-end receiver are the devices used in Airtel's STB.

India's TV and consumer market is sure to present some pleasant surprise opportunities to the semiconductor and other electronic component companies in the coming years.