BOONTON, NJ – Total worldwide sales revenue for telecommunication gateways and session border controllers is expected to increase at a compounded rate of nearly 13% during the next five years, says Insight Research.
This specialized equipment enables traditional phone networks to interconnect with next-generation network services that make extensive use of the Internet. During 2008, nearly $2 billion worth of gateway technology will be sold in global markets. By 2013, sales of new gateway gear will increase to $3.5 billion annually, says the firm.
While global gateway sales will increase to nearly 13% during the forecast period, hybrid-fiber coax gateways, SIP gateways, and session border controllers will buck trends and are expected to exhibit sales revenue growth rates in excess of 30%, says Insight.
"The next-generation network, which will make extensive use of IP and web services is still years away from generating serious revenue, and in the meantime carriers are not about to fork lift out the infrastructure that makes them money today," said Robert Rosenberg, Insight’s president.
"Gateways form the link between today's revenue-generating services and what the carriers will be building to generate their future revenue streams, so we expect the telecommunications gateway market to continue growing for at least the next five years," Rosenberg added.
LYON, FRANCE -- According to Yole Developpement, the MEMS switch and varicaps markets will reach $700 million in sales by 2012. Growth is driven by handset applications.
NUREMBERG and ARLINGTON, VA – Consumer electronics revenues in China are forecast to reach $100 billion by 2009, surpassing Western Europe and North America between 2009 and 2010, say market researcher GfK and the Consumer Electronics Association.
ARLINGTON, VA – The Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency provided Northrop Grumman's Electronic Systems a $1.7 million contract to develop an ultra high capacity hybrid thermal ground plane to fight semiconductor-generated heat employed in electronic systems.
The 18-month contract follows a $1.5 million contract awarded earlier this year to the University of Colorado, Boulder and Lockheed Martin to work on comparable technology.
Together, both contracts eventually could be worth about $10 million, says the agency, provided all phases are completed.
These agreements come on the heels of a recent Navy report predicting shipboard cooling requirements would double every six years for the next 20 years.
BANNOCKBURN, IL – IPC will hold a conference on November 6 at the Wyndham Hotel DFW, Irving, TX, to discuss the details of the IPC-9592 power conversion standard: Requirements for Power Conversion Devices for the Computer and Telecommunications Industries.
The meeting will outline the process and input that went into developing this first-ever power conversion standard, which is in its final stages. The conference agenda will cover power conversion product attributes, including product specifications and document requirements; design for reliability; design and qualification testing, and manufacturing conformance testing.
The committee members for the standard will present the sessions. These volunteer members – representing Alcatel-Lucent, Cisco Systems, Dell Inc., Emerson Network Power, Hewlett-Packard Co., IBM, Lineage Power and Murata Power Solutions – will describe the logic used to craft each chapter.
SAN JOSE, CA – Global sales of semiconductors for the first half of 2008 grew to $127.5 billion, an increase of 5.4% year-over-year, the Semiconductor Industry Association reported today.
June sales of $21.6 billion were up 8% compared to June 2007, and up 0.5% sequentially.
Second-quarter sales of $64.7 billion increased 3% sequentially.
Thus far, increased energy costs have had little impact on demand for electronic products that drive semiconductor demand, said the association.
“Continuing strength in international markets – coupled with healthy demand in the U.S. – helped drive higher worldwide sales of semiconductors in June,” said SIA president George Scalise. “Key demand drivers for semiconductors – especially personal computers, which account for 40% of semiconductor sales, and mobile phones, which drive about 20% of demand – continued to show double-digit unit growth. JPMorgan recently revised upward its forecast for unit sales of personal computers to 13%, with sharp increases in sales of portable systems. Forecasts for unit sales growth of mobile handsets range from 10% to 12% for 2008.
”Emerging markets are a major factor in driving worldwide semiconductor sales,” Scalise continued. “PC unit sales in emerging markets are expected to grow by 19% – more than double the growth rate in developed markets this year. In 2008, developing countries – with sales of over 153 million units – will account for half of worldwide PC sales. In mobile phones, developing countries are expected to account for 66% of total worldwide unit sales of over 1.3 billion, up from 61% last year. The emergence of large middle-class populations in China, India, Eastern Europe, and Latin America has more than offset the effects of slower growth in the U.S. economy. We expect demand for consumer electronic products in these new markets will continue to outpace growth in developed markets for the next several years.
“Inventory for the industry is in balance with minor excess in a few product sectors,” Scalise noted.
SIA said total semiconductor sales in June, excluding memory products, grew 12% year-over-year. Price attrition in memory products contributed to a 6% year-over-year decline in total memory sales, despite sharply increased unit sales.
“Advances in semiconductor technology continue to deliver huge benefits to consumers, as semiconductor devices deliver higher performance and increased functionality at lower cost,” said Scalise. “At the same time, rapid price declines for microchips tend to mask the real growth of the industry. The cost of 1 gigabit of DRAM has declined by 43% during the past year, while the price of 2 gigabits of NAND flash has declined by 61% in the last 12 months. Lower prices enable increased memory content in consumer devices. Micron estimates the memory content of the average PC will increase at least 50% this year, while the memory content in the average cellphone will increase by more than 150%.”
During the past 10 years, the price of a typical desktop PC has declined by nearly two-thirds, while performance and functionality have increased by a factor of more than a hundred, said Scalise. “The impact of advanced technology on energy efficiency is even more dramatic,” Scalise said. “A recent independent study showed computers have become nearly three million percent more energy-efficient over the past 30 years,” he concluded.
