conference report CS Europe
Analysts are tipping tremendous growth for the compound semiconductor industry
Speaking at CS Europe 2012, leading market analysts predicted healthy sales growth for GaAs microelectronics, plus rocketing revenues for LEDs and wide bandgap devices. Richard Stevenson reports.
I
n some ways, all our purchasing habits are very similar; but in others ways they are markedly different. Nearly all of us only buy and fit a new light bulb when the existing one fails. But when it comes to mobile devices, some of us upgrade very frequently, others make do with the same model for a couple of years, and there are also those that cart around handsets that they bought in the previous decade.
For the compound semiconductor industry, the implications of these differences in purchasing behaviour are massive. They explain why the LED industry is tipped to grow massively over the next few years, but could go into reverse around 2020, while sales of chips for mobile devices could steadily rise for many, many years.
These insights, along with revenue predictions for LEDs, GaAs ICs and a host of other devices, were provided by some of our industry’s leading analysts at the second
CS Europe conference. This two-day gathering – attracting almost 250 delegates to the Hilton in Frankfurt, Germany – kicked-off with an overview of the entire compound semiconductor industry by Asif Anwar of Strategy Analytics.
Greater detail on the LED industry followed in a talk by Philip Smallwood from IMS Research, while very positive predictions for the wide bandgap market came from a presentation from Yole Développement’s Philippe Roussel.
Anwar delivered a very promising message, which he summed up in just one sentence: “Compound semiconductors are, and will remain, a key enabling technology across wireless, consumer, automotive and defence sectors.”
At the beginning of his talk, he honed in on RF GaAs devices, which are a key component in many handsets, including smartphones. They are also used for amplification in Wi-Fi networks and will soon enable communication between one machine and another. The market for the GaAs chips used in these established and emerging applications is fairly buoyant, having grown by more than 30 percent between 2009 and 2010. Although 2012 will be a ‘challenging year’, according to Anwar, total device revenue should rise towards $6 billion by 2015.
Table
1.According to IMS,the strengths of LED light bulbs include: The absence of mercury and lead; 40,000 hour lifetimes; great robustness; and no cold-starting
issues.Credit: IMS Research
14
www.compoundsemiconductor.net April / May 2012
Wireless traffic is increasing at a tremendous rate. To accommodate for this, there is a build-out of faster networks involving base-stations, back-haul links, fibre networks and broadband systems. To vastly increase capacity, transmission date rates through fibre are rising
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