Communications semi market with slight downturn in 2011

The 10GbE market continued its upward swing with growth in categories such as 10GbE switch chips, which grew 86.5 percent (exceeding $200 million) and 10GbE NIC ports which shipped 111 percent more than 2010. "While last year had a disappointing finish, there was significant growth by vendors in several categories and we predict increased revenues for 2012," said Joseph Byrne, senior analyst of The Linley Group. "This report includes the detailed analysis and company rankings vital to helping chip vendors, investors and OEMs quickly and thoroughly understand this dynamic market." Among the top 20 suppliers included in the report, MediaTek, Entropic and Semtech showed the fastest growth. Broadcom maintained its strong lead in the communications ASSPs market with a 33 percent share and, following its acquisition of Broadlight, should overtake PMC-Sierra as the leader in the PON market. Marvell narrowly overtook Intel to become the second-largest communications ASSP supplier, but Intel fared well in Ethernet, gaining in 10GbE and GbE controllers and entering the 10GbE switch market by acquiring Fulcrum. Intel is also the top-ranked embedded processor supplier with 40 percent of the market, while Freescale is second. However, Freescale is the largest supplier of processors to the communications market and Intel plays second in this area, with Cavium in third place, but showing the fastest growth. In FPGAs, second place Altera's superior execution in the 40nm generation helped it narrow the gap with the current leader, Xilinx.