PALM SPRINGS, Calif.-Speaking at a Goldman Sachs Technology Symposium, the head of Texas Instruments Inc.’s wireless business unit said the company expects last year’s accelerated pace in the market for wireless phones to continue into this year.
Gilles Delfassy, vice president and manager of TI’s worldwide wireless communications business, noted that the company’s outlook for strong demand would continue as semiconductor technology propels the market toward third-generation phones that will link to the Internet through high-speed connections.
“The wireless market is still booming,” said Delfassy. “We estimate that the digital wireless handset market will grow by more than 60 percent this year to 435 million units.”
Delfassy also noted it took five years in the mid-1990s for TI to ship its first 100 million digital signal processor “brains” into the wireless market and that the company will ship that many to wireless phone manufacturers in the first few months of this year alone.
“By working closely with the world’s leading digital phone makers, we’ve been able to make wireless phones smarter, more powerful and more mobile. The next step is enabling new features in wireless handsets like streaming audio, video and mobile e-commerce through wireless broadband capabilities,” added Delfassy.
