Wired comms chip market to rise 20% in 2010, says analyst

LONDON – On the back of renewed enterprise spending in the first half of 2010, the wired communications semiconductor market is set to grow 20 percent in 2010, according to analysis firm the Linley Group.

Ethernet ICs will be the fastest growing category, with Ethernet ASSP revenue projected to rise nearly 40 percent in 2010. Meanwhile for the five-year period from 2009 to 2014, multicore communications processor sales are expected to accelerate and should grow at a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 28 percent, Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.) said. Network processors are expected to show a CAGR of 11 percent over the same period.

Carrier investment to support services such as IPTV and 4G cellular could accelerate growth in passive optical networks, home networking, FPGAs, and embedded processors, according to Linley while the building of massive data centers to support initiatives such as cloud computing may accelerate adoption of 40-gigabit per second and 100-gigabit per second Ethernet wires.

"As data centers continue their transition to new networking technologies, such as 10 Gigabit and faster Ethernet, we anticipate a strong recovery this year and potential for modest growth in 2011 and thereafter," said Joseph Byrne, senior analyst at The Linley Group, in a statement. "We also see emerging economies, such as India, contributing significantly to growth in overall networking IC sales. Although visibility remains limited because of volatile economic conditions, we expect that the communications semiconductor market will continue to expand through 2014."

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