Date: 19/06/2012

10GbE switch chip market grew 86.5%: Linley

The Linley Group has announced availability of the “Communications Semiconductor Market Share 2011” report that provides data, analysis and supplier rankings for more than 20 product categories. The report highlights significant growth in the 10GbE market and indicates a dip of 3 percent revenue overall.

According to the report, the year started off strong with industry revenue growing in the first half of 2011, but declined in the second half because of OEMs paring inventory and wireless operators completing projects and deferring further investment. The 10GbE market continued its upward swing with growth in categories such as 10GbE switch chips, which grew 86.5 percent (exceeding $200 million) and 10GbE NIC ports which shipped 111 percent more than 2010.

“While last year had a disappointing finish, there was significant growth by vendors in several categories and we predict increased revenues for 2012,” said Joseph Byrne, senior analyst of The Linley Group. “This report includes the detailed analysis and company rankings vital to helping chip vendors, investors and OEMs quickly and thoroughly understand this dynamic market.”

Other findings by Linley:

MediaTek, Entropic and Semtech which were among the top 20 suppliers included in the report, showed the fastest growth. Broadcom maintained its strong lead in the communications ASSPs market with a 33 percent share and, following its acquisition of Broadlight, should overtake PMC-Sierra as the leader in the PON market. Marvell marginally overtook Intel to become the second-largest communications ASSP supplier. Intel priced well in Ethernet, gaining in 10GbE and GbE controllers and entering the 10GbE switch market by acquiring Fulcrum.

Intel is also the top-ranked embedded processor supplier with 40 percent of the market, while Freescale is second. However, Freescale is the largest supplier of processors to the communications market and Intel plays second in this area, with Cavium in third place, but showing the fastest growth.

In FPGAs, second place Altera’s superior execution in the 40nm generation helped it narrow the gap with the current leader, Xilinx.

Other key suppliers in this market includes Broadcom, Freescale, Lantiq, LSI, PMC-Sierra, Realtek, and EZchip.

The report is available at http://www.linleygroup.com/comms-share
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N