Contributors: Bob Wheeler, Jag Bolaria, Joseph Byrne, Michael Stanford In This Issue
A Guide to Communications Processors is now available. This report looks at processors for SOHO gateways as well as for SMB and access. Covered vendors include Cavium, Freescale, Ikanos, Mindspeed, PMC-Sierra, and Ubicom. For more details, click here. The past year has been an eventful one for vendors of handset processors. Handset sales slowed, Motorola stumbled, Nokia opened to new suppliers, and long-awaited consolidation occurred. Let's take a few moments to identify the winners and losers. Winners: Infineon and MediaTek saw the biggest increases in market share in 2007. Infineon got a big boost from its acquisition of the Agere business from LSI, giving it Samsung as a major account. Infineon also gained momentum from its ultra-low-cost eGOLD products. MediaTek continues to clean up in low-cost Asian phones, and its acquisition of Analog Devices' cellular business gives the Taiwanese company a worldwide presence while adding TD-SCDMA capability for the Chinese market. Losers: Qualcomm's legal team lost several rulings to Broadcom, leading to a U.S. ban on importation of Qualcomm chips that infringe the Broadcom patent. The company has also been unable to settle a dispute with Nokia that has blossomed into a worldwide legal confrontation. Qualcomm's lawyers were even found to have engaged in "gross litigation misconduct," and its top attorney was forced to resign. Fortunately, the company's engineers were more successful, delivering a bushel of new products that are gaining share in the 3G market. Winners: Infineon, Broadcom, and ST were anointed as second sources for Nokia's GPRS, EDGE, and 3G handsets, respectively. Infineon and Broadcom were chosen after exhaustive research indicated they had the best products available in these categories. Both will gain revenue from Nokia in 2008. ST was chosen because, well, it isn't Qualcomm. ST, in fact, has no 3G technology of its own and was willing to adopt a Nokia design team that will design a processor using Nokia technology and sell it back to Nokia. If all goes well, this new device could generate revenue in 2010. Losers: Freescale and NXP did little in 2007 and therefore lost ground to the aforementioned winners. NXP acquired Silicon Labs' cellular products, gaining CMOS RF technology but no real market share. Freescale was neither a buyer nor a seller and didn't get a piece of Nokia's pie. Freescale was further wounded by the market-share collapse of its primary (only) customer, Motorola. Both NXP and Freescale made news by going private in 2006, but a year later, nothing has changed. --Linley Additional coverage of handset processors appears in our report A Guide to Wireless Handset Processors. As the "other" CPU core vendor, Tensilica has to try harder. The company recently showed off an improved lineup of preconfigured cores. The new Diamond 106 CPU is smaller than an ARM7 but delivers ARM9-class performance. In a 65nm process, the 106 measures 500 x 300 microns (yes, we are measuring CPUs in microns now), or about 0.15mm2 including 4KB each of instruction and data memory. Yet the CPU is rated at 600MHz, or 750 MIPS. Tensilica offers several other Diamond cores with similar clock speeds but varying feature sets. The Diamond cores are also available in 130nm and 90nm versions. In addition, Diamond serves as a first step toward Tensilica's configurable cores, which enable the customer to add their own features and instructions to optimize the design. With CPU cores becoming so small, system-on-a-chip designs can easily incorporate several of them. Although the existing software base gives ARM a lock on handset application CPUs, Tensilica is making a play for complementary handset applications such as video processing, Bluetooth and GPS processing, and mobile TV. Similarly, Tensilica CPUs can offload the data plane in broadband gateways and other networking equipment. With the average number of CPUs per cell phone likely to exceed 2.0 within the next few years, Tensilica has plenty of sockets to target. --Linley Tensilica will be appearing at The Linley Tech seminar on CPU Cores and IP in March 2008. NXP recently acquired GloNav, a small GPS-chip vendor based in southern California. Although NXP demonstrated its own GPS chip set at CES last year, this software-based solution requires a processor that is more expensive and power-hungry than most handsets will tolerate. GloNav provides a complete low-power solution for handsets, portable navigation devices, and similar products. NXP is likely to integrate this GPS capability into its Bluetooth or cellular-baseband products. One problem: GloNav's RF chip uses SiGe instead of CMOS, making it difficult to integrate the RF function. --Linley Coverage of NXP's connectivity products appears in our report A Guide to Wi-Fi/Bluetooth Connectivity Chips. Spreadtrum, the leading China-based supplier of cellular baseband processors, has acquired Quorum, a small vendor of CMOS RF transceivers. The San Diego company has already developed a single-chip transceiver for GSM/EDGE and TD-SCDMA, the Chinese 3G standard. The deal enables Spreadtrum to offer a complete chip set for TD-SCDMA handsets. Because Quorum uses CMOS RF, Spreadtrum can now develop future GSM/EDGE and TD-SCDMA processors with integrated RF. --Linley Additional coverage of Spreadtrum's products appears in our report A Guide to Wireless Handset Processors.
The Linley Group is pleased to announce its first market-forecast report. This report provides 23 data tables, accompanied by graphs, spanning the wired and wireless communications markets. The report complements our market-share research and our ongoing coverage of wired and wireless chips, and it draws on both of these sources. Extending our ongoing coverage of the industry, the report outlines both our quantitative estimates and the important assumptions behind them so that readers can better integrate our forecasts with other information they may have. Readers will be able to use the forecasts to make investment and product plans and for additional context about the industry. In the wireless market, revenue from baseband processors will grow at nearly 5% annually from 2006 to 2011. Handset shipments will grow at about 8%, and the integration of additional functions in the baseband processor will minimize price declines. The large handset market provides outsized growth opportunities for next-generation connectivity chips and mobile-TV receivers. The report is available in either a single or corporate license. The single license includes a brief printed text summary providing analysis of the data and a non-printing PDF providing market forecasts for more than fifteen product categories. The corporate license provides the printed summary, a printable PDF file, and a Microsoft Excel workbook containing the data. Special offer: order by January 15 using promotion code "CE" and save $300 on Communications Silicon Market Forecast 2006 - 2011. For more information, including lists of tables and figures, visit our web site. To receive Linley on CE via e-mail, you must register on our web site
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