Worldwide revenues for communications processors rose to $1,8-billion in 2013, an increase of 8,8% compared to 2012, according to the latest communications processor market share and forecast study from International Data Corporation (IDC).
“The communications processor market is on a steady growth path,” says Abhi Dugar, research manager: semiconductors at IDC. “The emergence of open standards is causing disruption in the traditional OEM, ODM, semiconductors, and embedded software value chain, creating new opportunities for merchant silicon vendors to displace ASIC-based proprietary solutions.
“A new breed of multicore communications processors, SOCs and standalone MPUs implemented in 28nm process technology and below are starting to hit the market now, which are enabling better network visibility, manageability, and scalability in support of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) adoption by cloud service providers, web service providers, and telecom network operators.
“This is a secular multi-year trend that IDC believes will continue to drive the communications processor market forward over the next five years.”
In 2013, Freescale held the leading market position with 37,7% of the overall worldwide communications processor revenue share with its Power Architecture and ARM-based SOCs. Intel, with its x86 standalone MPUs, earned the second spot with 25,2% market share in 2013.
With a 44,5% year-over-year increase in its revenues in 2013, Cavium’s MIPS architecture-based SOCs placed third in market share at 13,3% in 2013. Avago/LSI and Broadcom earned the fourth and fifth market share positions respectively.
IDC forecasts that communications processor revenue growth in 2014 will be 5,1%, and the market will continue to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5,8% through 2018. IDC observes that the decline in infrastructure capex spending that had negatively impacted the overall communications semiconductor market in the fourth quarter of 2012 and through the first quarter of 2013 reversed during the rest of 2013.
Although the fourth quarter of 2013 was slow compared to the previous two quarters, IDC now believes that infrastructure spending is poised for stronger growth in 2014 following the improvement in job growth in the US and stabilisation of the sovereign debt issues in Europe.
