SoC industry dynamics beyond smartphone era

By _praxthoughts

September 11, 2017

Smartphones play a vital role in our life; it is sort of panacea for us. It has achieved massive growth in the last decade. With such demand of the end-product, it is obvious that the supply side has worked in overdrive. Semiconductor industry has seen massive growth due to smartphones. The number of OEMs increased to fulfil the volume demands, pulling more vendors into semiconductor industry to suffice the OEMs’ supply chain requirements.

Few OEMs made fortune in smartphone sales, with revenue exceeding billions cumulatively. Such capital inflow encouraged them to invest more money on product development, to fulfil the end-users’ paradoxical requirement of more performance with more battery life (less power consumption) at a lower price. With cumulative silicon sales going into billions, the semiconductor industry responded positively, and focused on stretching the innovation into leading process nodes and other techniques to enhance performance.

Smartphones as a forerunner

Smartphone fuelled innovation in the semiconductor industry. System on Chip (SoC) vendors were excited about the huge sales prospect and did their best to capture the market, by venturing into expensive leading process nodes, complemented with research to enhance performance without compromising on power consumption. Obviously, smartphones acted as a forerunner in terms of technology adoption. With smartphones’ shelf life of anywhere between 18-24 months, SoC vendors churn out new offerings with less lead time, as each SKU has guaranteed sales volume of millions.

General-purpose or stock SoCs achieved humongous growth in terms of sales and innovation. All these innovations have some externality, as these latest technologies spilled over to adjacent markets such as embedded and consumer electronics, and led to their growth.

Is the party over?

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