Imagination raises outlook for graphic cores

LONDON – Imagination Technologies Group plc, a leading licensor of multimedia cores for use in ICs, has increased its guidance for the number of chips containing its intellectual property shipping in the financial year to March 31.

In its interim financial update Imagination (Kings Langley, England) did not refer to the Japanese earthquake which is thought to be affecting deliveries and builds of such products as the iPad2 and some smartphones. Observers said the impact of this event is expected to hit in Q2 and Q3 of the calendar year, corresponding to the first half of Imagination's next financial year.

"Based on the royalty reports for the period to December 2010, the Group expects the volume of chips shipped in the second half to comfortably exceed the 107 million shipped in the first half. As a result full-year volume is expected to exceed the previously set target of 200 million by some margin," the company said.

Imagination said this was due to existing design wins that were now going into high volume production, which would fuel strong royalty revenue growth.

The vast majority of these units are Imagination's PowerVR series of graphics processor cores although the company also offers the Ensigma communications cores and Meta multi-threaded general purpose processor. The success of PowerVR is important because the worldwide embedded graphics market alone has the potential to reach multi-billion annual units over the next five years or so, the company said.

Imagination's leading competitor ARM Holdings plc (Cambridge, England) is only thought to be shipping a couple of million of its Mali graphics cores per year, but is expecting to grow market share.

In an interim financial update Imagination said that the emergence of open source operating systems including Android was driving the deployment of Meta processor cores, its Ensigma UCC communications and broadcast IP as well as PowerVR.

However, Imagination warned about tough trading conditions in U.K. elsewhere affecting sales of equipment by its Pure digital audio broadcast division.


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