Date: 29/03/2015

China, mobile, IoT and automotive to shuffle semiconductor vendor ranking in 2014-15

The semiconductor market started shifting its centre of gravity to Asia during PC boom of late 80s, and the swirlwind of action now is in China. Asia consumed approximately 60% global semiconductor output in year 2014 and in that China's share is more than 60%. China is not only the world's electronics factory, and is also fast emerging as semiconductor device factory of the world. IC chips are now fabricated in China at 28nm, node at which the maximum sales of chips are now happening. China's share in non-IC semiconductor business such as opto (image sensor), mems and discrete semiconductor business is continuously growing. This trend which started in 2013 continues in 2014 and forecasted to continue in 2015.

What type of semiconductor products sales revenue grew world-wide in 2014? Mobile devices have consumed maximum of the semiconductor output. The fast growing market is memory which includes NAND flash and DRAM basically due to demand of their use in mobile devices. Demand for high efficiency power supply regulation in solar PV inverters, ac/dc adapters of mobile devices and electric vehicles have created market growth for power supply ICs and discrete power semiconductor devices. IoT, smart home, security and automotive is driving growth of microcontroller chips, security ID chips, analog IC chips and short range wireless chips and sensors. Wearable devices has triggered growth in some kind SoCs which are nothing but advanced MCUs. MEMS sensors is another fast growing area due to their use in multiple markets such as mobile phones, automotive, wearable and smart homes.

FPGA continue to grow as interesting category which is now transforming into programmable SoC. Both pure FPGA and programmable SoC growing due to its gaining importance in lot more new applications. programmable SoC is creating new markets. While writing this article there was rumoured news of Intel acquiring Altera, indicating the potential of FPGA industry.

What is not growing is PC related processors and other chips, and also some of the ICs used in non-smart consumer electronics devices .Basically any smart function integrated market is growing, it can be smart phone, smart home, smart city, or smart TV and the latest car (modern car is not exactly called as smart car, but it is getting as smart and the name is self driving/autonomous cars.) IoT is the key enabler of smart factor.

These above are the product trends in 2014 and are expected to show similar market behaviour in 2015 with more sales from IoT, wearable and automotive and slightly decreased growth in smart phone space.

Semiconductor vendor ranking:
The top three chip vendors Intel, Samsung and Qualcomm are into processor/ SoC business for digital computing devices. Intel is increasing its revenue share more from mobile and IoT space. The second biggest chip vendor Samsung is into most of the hot areas of chip making with less presence in PCs. Memory is still Samsung's major revenue earner followed by mobile application processors and ID chips. where as Qualcomm is highly dependent on mobile phone/smart phone and is strong contender in IoT/wearable.

The next top three are memory specific leaders both in DRAM and NAND flash memory market. Micron and Hynix can be considered more of a memory vendors, where as Toshiba is also into non-memory chips but revenue share is less. Micron's non-memory area focus is basically image sensors.

After the top 6 IC vendors down the rank, it’s a mix of multidomain experts such as Texas Instruments, STMicroelectronics and NXP Semiconductors and automotive semiconductor vendors such as Freescale and Infineon and Renesas. NXP and Freescale are merging to stay in the top among these 6. AMD, a PC processor strong vendor slipping down in ranking, while it is slowly migrating to embedded computing.

Below table is the list of top 50 semiconductor vendors in 4th quarter of 2014. There are growing number of fabless companies and 3 China based companies in this top 50 vendor ranking list.

Rank	Vendor Name	Head Office	4Q 2014 Revenue Range in US$ (B: Billion, M:Million)
1	Intel	US	>10B
2	Samsung Semiconductor	South Korea	5-10B
3	Qualcomm	US	5-10B
4	Micron	US	1-5B
5	Hynix	South Korea	1-5B
6	Toshiba	Japan	1-5B
7	Texas Instruments	US	1-5B
8	Broadcom	US	1-5B
9	STMicroelectronics	Europe	1-5B
10	Mediatek	Taiwan	1-5B
11	Avago Tech	US	1-5B
12	Renesas	Japan	1-5B
13	NXP Semiconductors	Europe	1-5B
14	Nvidia	US	1-5B
15	AMD	US	1-5B
16	Infineon	Europe	1-5B
17	Freescale Semiconductor	US	1-5B
18	Sony	Japan	1-5B
19	ON Semiconductor	US	500M -1B
20	Marvell	US	500M -1B
21	Sky Works	US	500M -1B
22	Analog Devices	US	500M -1B
23	Rohm	Japan	500M -1B
24	Hisilicon	China	500M -1B
25	Xilinx	US	500M -1B
26	Maxim	US	500M -1B
27	Microchip	US	500M -1B
28	Altera	US	300-500M
29	Novatek	Taiwan	300-500M
30	Dialog	Europe	300-500M
31	Mitsubishi	Japan	300-500M
32	RFMD	US	300-500M
33	Socionext	Japan	300-500M
34	Atmel	US	300-500M
35	Spreadtrum	China	300-500M
36	TriQuint Semiconductor	US	300-500M
37	Fairchild Semiconductor	US	300-500M
38	Spansion	US	300-500M
39	Microsemi	US	300-500M
40	Cirrus Logic	US	100-300M
41	Realtek	Taiwan	100-300M
42	Himax	China	100-300M
43	Macronix	Taiwan	100-300M
44	CSR	Europe	100-300M
45	Cypress Semiconductor	US	100-300M
46	AMS (Austria Mikro sys)	Europe	100-300M
47	Megachips	Japan	100-300M
48	Silicon Labs	US	100-300M
49	IDT	US	100-300M
50	PMC-Sierra	US	100-300M

Table1: Top 50 global semiconductor vendors in 4Q 2014

This table below lists top 25 semiconductor vendors in 4th Quarter of 2014 by growth.

Rank by Growth	Company
1	Dialog Semiconductor
2	Inphi
3	Cirrus Logic
4	TriQuint Semiconductor
5	Megachips
6	Sky Works
7	IDT
8	RFMD
9	Micron
10	Qualcomm
11	Holtek
12	Pericom
13	ON Semiconductors
14	Sony
15	Cavium
16	Samsung Semiconductor
17	Avago Tech
18	Silicon Labs
19	Himax
20	Melexis
21	Nvidia
22	NXP Semiconductors
23	PMC-Sierra
24	Intel
25	M/ACOM

Table2: Top 25 fast growing global semiconductor vendors in 4Q 2014.

Above points are market reserch highlights from the full latest report titled "Gobal semiconductor market 2015" from EMITT Solutions.

Below is the contents of the "Gobal semiconductor market 2015" by EMITT Solutions:

1. Worldwide semiconductor market
a. Past highlights
b. Present figures
c. Future predictions

2. Detailed semiconductor vendor ranking:

a. Global top 100 Tier1 and Tier2 semiconductor vendors
b. Tier3 semiconductor analysis:
c. The stars in the Tier 3
d. The sinking ships in all Tiers

3. In-depth analysis of each of the top 25 fast growing semiconductor vendors:

4. The biz models:
a. Fab heavy merchant chipmakers
b. Fab light merchant chipmakers
c. Chip Foundries
d. Fables semiconductor companies
e. Electronic companies designing own chips

5. Product market analysis:
a. The digital chip market
b. Analog mixed signal chip market
c. SOC chip market
d. RF wireless chip market
e. IOT chip market
f. FPGA market

6. Silicon versus other compound semiconductor materials
a. Nanometre race
b. 450 MM analysis

7. Application market analysis
a. Automotive
b. Mobile communication
c. Wearable and IOT
d. Industrial
e. Computers and servers
f. Aerospace and defence
g. Consumer electronics
h. Medical electronics
I. Others

8. Geographical analysis of semiconductor market
a. US semiconductor market
b. Europe semiconductor market
c. Japan semiconductor market
d. China semiconductor market
e. South-East Asia semiconductor market
f. India semiconductor market
g. South America semiconductor market
h. Taiwan Semiconductor market
i. South Korea semiconductor market
j. Others

9. Semiconductor component distribution trends
10. Semiconductor component marketing trends
11. Semiconductor component customer support trends
12. Obsolete/life-cycle issues of IC components
13. Counterfeit duplicate part issues in semiconductor market

14. Specific technology trends:
a. X86 versus ARM processor core
b. Open source software influence on semi market
c. Monolithic versus system on module/system in package
d. Influence of EDA tools in the semi market
e. Third-party silicon IP reuse
f. Economic valuation of IP patents in semi market
g. Increasing importance of audio and video processing
h. Security features in a chip
i. Commoditisation of semiconductor manufacturing
j. Strategic importance of semiconductor chips for regions
k. The China factor and India factor
l. Non-silicon future path

15. The top 10 best markets for the next 2 to 3 years
16. The top 10 vendors for the next five years
17. The top 10 strategic technologies in the next five years
18. The top 5 geographical markets for the next five years
19. The top 10 business innovations

For more details visit: http://www.emittsolutions.com/section/market-analysis/global-semiconductor-market-2015.html
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N
Author: Srinivasa Reddy N