If Motorola Inc.’s position as the No. 2 handset maker has remained tenuous during the past two years, the company just lost that same spot in another space in the semiconductor world-digital signal processors. DSPs process voice and video signals in the baseband of wireless handsets.
Agere Inc., which at one time was the second-largest supplier of that product, has edged out the Schaumburg, Ill.-based company to regain its No. 2 seat. Texas Instruments Inc. remains numero uno with almost 40-percent revenue growth garnered from shipments of its cellular baseband products.
“That’s clearly a case of the `sins of the father’ visited upon the `child,’ ” noted Forward Concepts in a recent report. The report said Motorola’s chip division, which soon will be called Freescale Semiconductor Inc., suffered a revenue decline of 8 percent because of GSM/GPRS order declines from the handset division.
“Since Motorola PCS (personal communications sector) buys 100 percent of its CDMA baseband chips from Qualcomm, that leaves mostly GSM/GPRS and iDEN chips that they order from SPS (Semiconductor Products Sector),” said the report. “So if the parent company’s shipments are down in GSM/GPRS, that negatively affects SPS DSP revenues.”
Forward Concepts also identified Analog Devices Inc. as one of the players that gained semiconductor market share through the sales of cellular baseband and consumer audio shipments.
The world Semiconductor Trade Statistics said the DSP market jumped 26.3 percent last year compared with 2002, touting revenues of $6.13 billion. Consumer shipments, according to the report, grew 109 percent, although wireless jumped 32 percent in the same period.
But DSP market figures are becoming deceptive because some companies now classify the chips as application-specific integrated circuits, which are usually dedicated to specific functions within devices and infrastructures, Forward concepts said.
STMicroelectronics and Infineon Technologies, two top-tier players in the field, may have slipped from the radar because they identify their DSP chips as ASICs.
