Study Predicts Surge in Demand for Bluetooth
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Study Predicts Surge in Demand for Bluetooth
03:36 AM GMT on Oct 24, 2000
[Press Release]
A new study by Frost & Sullivan, the international marketing consulting company, predicts a bright future for the suppliers and developers of wireless technology chipsets.
The main beneficiary of the boom in short-range wireless communication semiconductors will be the Bluetooth sector, galvanised by plummeting costs and the wireless technology solution's connectivity options and diverse functionality.
Michael Wall, Research Analyst at Frost & Sullivan, believes that despite the number of short-term problems that need to be resolved by developers, the short-range wireless communication semiconductor market will fulfill stellar growth predictions.
Issues that need to be addressed surround interoperability, signal interference and the lack of clarity over the qualification process for Bluetooth products.
Restrictions in the supply of chipsets to smaller product developers may also delay the launch of new innovative applications, which will provide attractive new revenue streams for chipset suppliers.
Comfortably outperforming the Wireless LAN, HomeRF and DECT sectors, the Bluetooth chipsets industry is set to report global revenues worth $2.3 billion in 2006. This equates to global shipments of over 956.0 million in the same year. In terms of applications, cellular phones and mobile computers are in the vanguard of the impending avalanche of Bluetooth-enabled product releases.
Falling production costs and the advent of mobile computing will push global sales of 2.4 GHz Wireless LAN products to $1.3 billion in 2006. Frost & Sullivan expects demand for direct sequencing 802.11b chipsets, in particular, to soar to new heights.
The U.S. Federal Communications Commission's (FCC) decision to allow data rates of up to 10 Mbps for HomeRF products will fuel the growth in the market for HomeRF chipsets.
"However," the study points out, "this technology will be limited to multi-PC home environments and some small offices. The HomeRF sector will be driven by the falling costs of frequency hopping chipsets and the increase of home networking."
Meanwhile, revenues in the DECT chipsets market are predicted to decline as chipsets prices decrease due to the maturity of the technology and the relaxation of the standard to accommodate lower quality chipsets.
The arrival of a range of development models will give fresh impetus to the Bluetooth semiconductor industry. Organisations are emerging to supply specific parts of the solution whilst other larger market contenders are leveraging their resources to provide integrated solutions from silicon wafer to consumer product level.
A number of smaller semiconductor developers, led by Cambridge Silicon Radio and Silicon Wave, have captured an early share of the market. Amongst the larger integrated Bluetooth developers, Philips Semiconductors is the most eminent semiconductor supplier offering solutions in volume.
A string of smaller design services companies are muscling into the market in a bid to cut themselves a slice of this booming industry, alongside large developers such as Microsoft and Intel, offering development skills for protocol software.
TTP Communications and Widcomm are two of the most prominent software houses providing complete or partial protocol stacks to semiconductor developers.
Frost & Sullivan highlights that the software stack is one of the most crucial elements of the solution, cementing its significance in the Bluetooth space as semiconductor companies come closer to launching their offerings onto the market.
This deliverable forms part of Frost & Sullivan's Bluetooth and Wireless LAN subscription service and analyses the global market for short-range wireless communication semiconductors. Wireless technology solutions under discussion are principally Bluetooth, Wireless LAN, HomeRF and DECT. All of these technologies operate in a similar environment and offer complementing and substitute functionality for each other.
The Bluetooth figures stated cover the main applications that Frost & Sullivan foresees integrating the technology over the next few years, and excludes some of the more speculative applications such as white goods or clothing. Wireless LAN figures cover those products operating in the 2.4 GHz ISM band. |
