Freescale leads telecom processors market with 37.7% share in 2013: IDC

Freescale is leading the telecom processors market with 37.7 percent worldwide revenue share with its Power Architecture and ARM-based SOCs.

The #2 position is held by Intel with 25.2 percent market share in 2013 with its x86 standalone MPUs.

Cavium’s MIPS architecture-based SOCs placed third in market share at 13.3 percent in 2013. Cavium revenues rose 44.5 percent in 2013.

Avago/LSI and Broadcom earned the fourth and fifth market share positions, respectively, said IDC.

Top telecom processors market vendors in 2013

1. Freescale 

2. Intel

3. Cavium

4. Avago/LSI

5. Broadcom

IDC said the global revenues for communications processors rose 8.8 percent to $1.8 billion in 2013.

Abhi Dugar, research manager, Semiconductors at IDC, said: “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.”

Freescale

The IDC report said 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.

New chip vendors 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.

Communications processor revenue growth in 2014 will be 5.1 percent, and the market will continue to expand at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 5.8 percent through 2018, said.

Decline in infrastructure Capex spending that had negatively impacted the overall telecommunications semiconductor market in the fourth quarter of 2012 and through the first quarter of 2013 reversed during the rest of 2013.

IDC says infrastructure spending is poised for stronger growth in 2014 following the improvement in job growth in the United States and stabilization of the sovereign debt issues in Europe.

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