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2008 - a good year for radio |
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Monday, 18 February 2008 |
Widespread deployment of WiMAX will help to make 2008 a very good year for radio technology and lend support to the slowing semiconductor market, according to Future Horizons’ CEO and chairman Malcolm Penn. WiMAX is being driven forward by would-be telecom network operators and PC chip manufacturers and is due to be trialled on a large scale in three US cities this year. Its global roll out will mean vastly increased mobile phone and laptop sales, boosting demand for chips. Zigbee and GPS are also set to experience growth in 2008 as the range of applications for these technologies drives higher attach rates.
As well as WiMAX’s four initial markets (broadband backhaul, developing world telecom infrastructure, geographically difficult to reach broadband customers and as a competitor to ADSL in the developed world) Penn believes that it will also become integral to 4G.
The global roll out of WiMAX will mean a wave of development of laptops and mobile phones to incorporate in-built capacity for the standard which, in turn, will mean that anyone in the design and manufacture of chips for these kinds of applications, and particularly potential WiMAX chip manufacturers, will have increased demand for their products.
“We expect that WiMAX products will be deployed into the marketplace with a compound annual until growth rate of 104.5%” said
Penn. “The corresponding semiconductor industry revenue growth will be 62.6%. Take into account other radio technologies that are about to explode into the market, like Zigbee and GPS, and it becomes clear that 2008 will be a good year for radio. Chip market growth is still set to slow, but these developments will certainly help to support it.”
www.futurehorizons.com |
