Communications chip manufacturers are looking forward to a booming market, despite facing increasing challenges, with more data than ever before now being transmitted via cables or to mobile and portable equipment; and with new transmission methods such as Bluetooth, wireless LAN, UMTS jostling for a place in the market.
According to a study by the management consultants Frost & Sullivan, over 96 million items of Bluetooth equipment will be sold this year, and by the year 2006 it will be more than 1000 million – half of them cordless phones – representing total sales of about US$290 billion.
Micrologic Research estimates that the number of available Bluetooth chipsets will nearly treble from 181 in 2003 to 527 in 2004, and again more than double in 2005. The main fields of application will be for cordless connections between computers and peripherals in the home and the office, in telephones, and in cars.
In a study for the coming four years, the American market research company Forward Concepts forecasts an annual doubling of the number of WLAN chipsets on the market.
Because such systems are more expensive, they will at first be used mainly by companies whose employees need to have constant access to important information on the in-house network. After the so-called public hot spots – at airports and stations, in hotels and at trade fairs – WLAN solutions are expected to then increasingly find their way into the home in the second phase of expansion.
Embedded WLAN solutions are also considered a good market for the future. The advantages of WLANs are the high bandwidth, the increased range, and not least a well defined standard. WLAN data transmission is therefore suitable for a mobile network or for internet access from a laptop or notebook computer.
Despite the advance of new technology, traditional transmission methods, such as simple twisted pairs of copper wires and glass fibres, have by not reached the end of the line. In cars, optical data buses using fibres of synthetic materials are coming more into the foreground.
The optical trunk network will soon allow very high data rates of over 1 terabit (1000 gigabits) per second over a single glass fibre. This solution is particularly suitable for linking supercomputers.
Location-based services (LBS) using either global positioning system (GPS) or cell broadcast service (CBS), which is related to the SMS system, are expected to provide the user of a mobile phone or PDA with information related to his or her current location, such as the shortest way to restaurants or tourist attractions or the nearest cash dispenser.
Communications chips are expected to become increasingly sophisticated in future: faster, with a greater bandwidth, more reliable and generally more versatile. More functions, such as the entire electronics of a mobile phone, may be integrated on a single chip, which could then allow video conferences or even TV to be displayed on a handy pocket device.
New advances and trends in communications technology will be on display at the Electronica 2002, at the New Munich Trade Fair Centre from 12 to 15 November 2002.