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Analyst: DSPs now driving the semis industry
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EE Times Europe


LONDON — The Digital Signal Processor sector is continuing to lose its identity as a separate chip class, and DSPs have actually become the driver for the entire semiconductor industry, according to an analyst who has long tracked the sector.

Will Strauss, president and principal analysts at Forward Concepts (Tempe, AZ) notes in his latest wireless newsletter that the Semiconductor Industry Association figures released last week indicate, at first sight, that DSP shipments (based on a 3-month rolling average) declined year-on-year by 47.2 percent versus a decline of 38.6 percent in December, led by weakness in units.

"However, this dramatic drop is not simply a decline in the DSP market, but a reflection that many chips classified as DSP last year are now classified as ASICs. For example, 3G baseband shipments by Freescale (classified last year as DSP) to Motorola have been largely displaced by 3G basebands from Qualcomm (which does not report its basebands as DSPs, but are accounted for as ASICs).

"Even if total January baseband shipments by Motorola were the same as last year (which they were not), the SIA would report a decline in DSP shipments and an increase in ASIC shipments," stressed Strauss.

He adds that virtually all MCUs and MPUs have added either Multiply-Accumulator (MAC) circuitry or Single-Instruction Multiple-Data (SIMD) circuitry so they can also perform DSP (and often graphics) in addition to their traditional data processing functions.

"DSP cores are also hugely popular in SoCs, but they are not counted as DSP chips. So, in this new era of always-connected access to the Internet and multimedia, DSP is the underlying technology."

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