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THE FABLESS IC design industry has been hit by lower-than-expected shipments of smartphones, PCs and notebooks, but the situation may improve.
Topology Research Institute (TRI), a division of TrendForce, reports that the global fables IC design industry will see a slight 3.8 percent growth in revenue for 2015, reaching US$91.3 billion thanks mostly to the Cloud and IoT trends.
TrendForce expects the annual revenue of the Chinese fabless IC design industry to grow above 15% in 2015 as it benefits from state support, technological advances and domestic market expansion.
Particular players to watch include Spreadtrum, after it was taken over by Tsinghua Unigroup, and got investment by Intel, as well as Huawei’s IC design subsidiary HiSilicon.
The IC design industry in China is being supported by the governmental National Integration Circuitry Investment Fund, as well as locally based funds that are very active in building the industry. These IC development funds have made a series of acquisitions since the start of this year, such as the takeover of the major CIS chip maker OmniVision at the price around US$1.9 billion. The development of China semiconductor sector will accelerate with these acquisitions.
While there is a price war in the application processor market, the large market allows price slashing while still continuing R&D, as indicated by the number of fables companies who have launched 4G markets for the mobile market.
The main competitors in the application processor market are MediaTek, Qualcomm, Intel and Spreadtrum.
Furthermore, the first wave of wearable devices in the IoT era has hit the market in 2015. Basic chip components for IoT products such as MCUs, communication chipsets and sensors have seen rapid growth.
The system-on-chip design that integrates different chip functions into one special chip component will become a trend in the development of communication chipsets. As a result, more combined chipsets will be available on the market in the future.