Date: 13/09/2008

The reason of growth among top-20 semiconductor vendors

If we analyze the list of top 20 semiconductor vendors by growth rate in the first half of 2008 (table below) released by market research company IC Insights, It's no more memory or processor focused world. It's more of wireless, SOC, embedded and consumer application specific products market.
Rank Company Growth in percentage from 1st half of 2007 to 1st half of 2008
1 TSMC 35
2 Qualcomm 29
3 Panasonic 26
4 Nvidia 23
5 Samsung 21
6 Braodcom 20
7 Infineon 19
8 ST Microelectronics 13
9 Fujitsu 11
10 NEC Electronics 11
11 Renesas 10
12 Intel 9
13 AMD 9
14 Micron 8
15 Sony 4
16 Freescale 3
17 Toshiba 1
18 NXP 1
19 Texas Instruments 0
20 Hynix -23



Wireless trend:
The most interesting market trend otherwise learning is from Qualcomm and Broadband growth. These two companies are not bothered about the manufacturing their devices. They are outsourcing it to companies like TSMC. TSMC ranked number one in growth due to its ability to manage manufacturing challenges (45nm, GHz capability of their silicons) posed by fabless chip designers like Qualcomm and Broadcom.
Qualcomm and Broadband both clearly focus on market-demanding technologies such as 3G, WiFi, Bluetooth and any such broadband wireless data communication technologies. Any other companies, which have also wisely invested in wireless devices, are also growing. WiMAX is another wireless technology helping the companies to increase their revenue. But it is still not so much as other wireless technologies. Next year it might be a better year for WiMAX. Intel and Fujitsu are the major stakeholders of this technology.
Zigbee is also a revenue-enhancing technology in its own scale.

Embedded trend:
Microcontroller (MCU) has picked up growth in 2008, and so is the growth of revenues for Infineon, Renesas, NEC, Freescale, Fujitsu, and Freescale. Even the other smaller MCU vendors have registered interesting growth. MCU can be predicted to be growing at 10% in 2008.

Automotive and Industrial trend:
Infineon and ST have the best of the breed ICs and other devices for this domain. Exclusive focus on this domain has got them the growth. Automotive demands are tough to meet; the European semiconductor vendors are always ahead of others.


Specialized consumer devices trend:
Panasonic's focus in supplying innovation products for portable consumer equipment got a double-digit growth for the company. Sony with not much presence or focus may slow down further giving out its share to Panasonic. NXP and Samsung are other two vendors with more focus on this area.

Processor (both graphic and traditional):
With multi-core and low power focus Intel and AMD have done fairly well. AMD got to find new strategies to weather Intel's newly released high performing processors. AMD has always given right answer by producing equally performing devices but at cheaper price. Nvidia is surging ahead by releasing graphic processor technologies for all the markets.

Memory Effect:
Samsung with technology edge over other vendors in making any type of memory devices is one rare example in this product area. Otherwise most of the memory vendors experiencing negative growth.