Communications Chip market generated estimated revenues of $9.8 billion in 4Q07, up by around 5% sequentially on Q-o-Q basis. Total shipments estimated during the period were 854 million chips. Texas Instruments leads the market with estimated 17.1% market share. Other leaders for the quarter are Freescale, STMicrosystems, Broadcom and Qualcomm which – among the four of them - held around 58% of the market during 4Q07.

Broadband segment is the main contributor to the overall communication chip shipments. However during the quarter broadband chips contribution remained flat at around $2.2 billion which is 22.6% of the overall communications chip revenues for the quarter.

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TriQuint Semiconductor registered revenues of $128.5 million in Q407 that were sequentially up by 5%. The company saw a strong demand for its handset product which saw 14% increase in revenue, with 59% being contributed by 3G. Besides, Wireless LAN also demonstrated strong growth.

During this period TriQuint introduced 802.11n chip for WLAN applications. For the mobile data market, it launched “Quad Band/Tri Band” 3G solution product. The company also announced availability of a high-voltage gallium arsenide (GaAs) power amplifier transistors designed to increase the efficiency of 3G cellular base stations leading to energy savings.

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Analog Devices posted $614 million revenue for the quarter which represented a decline of 1.5% q-o-q. Industrial market segment fetched about half of the revenues at 49% of the total. Communications was the second largest contributor with 23% followed by Consumer and Computer markets with 22% and 6% shares respectively.

Communication segment showed the maximum gain of 6% for the quarter. Other segments showed a decline except the industrial which grew marginally by 1%. The increase in communications revenues is attributed to wireless infrastructure applications uptake along with the Analog products used in mobile devices.

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Revenue posted by Cypress Semiconductor in 4Q was $431 million which represented a decline of 4% q-o-q. The main reasons for the decline was a decrease in Consumer and Computation Division (CCD) and Data Communication Division (DCD). However the Memory and Image Division (MIV) fetched 4% more revenues.

North America was the strongest market with 4% increase in revenues while Europe showed a modest growth of 1%. Asia reported 6% decrease with Japan however showing increase of 2% in revenue.

In the communication space West Bridge was the strongest product which alone fetched $5 million of the total revenues.

During this quarter it shipped 40 millionth CapSense system used in handsets. Cypress Semiconductors also announced programmable peripheral controller product Astoria.

Quarterly revenues for F5 Network were estimated at $154.2 million up 6 % compared to the last quarter. Geographically Americas represented 57% of revenue, EMEA 21% and APAC 22% of which Japan contributed half.

Among demands in their application delivery networking products, the company witnessed a strong growth in Europe, Middle East and Africa. Asia Pacific showed a decline in demand while America showed a modest rise.

F5’s core AND(application development network) was the main revenue generator which fetched in $139.4 million or 90% of total revenues. Besides other product segments, telecommunication accounted for 23% of revenues.

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Q4 revenues were $16.2 million up by 14% q-o-q. Net income for the period was $2 million. Enterprise and Datacenter segment fetched the most - 73% of the sales. Remaining 27% was brought in by access service provider, consumer broadband software services segments. Geographically China, Europe, Japan and Taiwan were significant business contributors for the company.

Cavium announced development of OCTEON Plus CN50XX MIPS64 embedded processor family which has a wide usage in the communications area for the devices like VoIP gateways, etc.

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Revenues in Q4 stood at $395.3 million, up by 1% compared to last quarter. Of this, communications chip manufacturing share was estimated at about $197 million. The chips were mainly made for the 3G handsets for various vendors.

SMIC also curtailed the DRAM foundry services and by the end of the year had cut the shipments by 22%. With the result the revenue from DRAM business was just 16.7% in the quarter compared to 23.6% in the third quarter. However the non-DRAM business grew by 13.5% in the quarter.

The total number of new customers reached 77 in the fourth quarter.

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Atheros posted a revenue of $114.3 million in 4Q’07 which was up by 8% reported in the last quarter. Income for the period was $21.4 million. The networking chipsets fetched revenues of 52% while PC OEM got in 43% and the rest of 5% was brought in through consumer chipsets.

Major growth was seen in core wireless LAN segment, particularly the 11g solutions that contributed primarily to the overall growth in this quarter. Wireless LAN chipsets contribution by types was 11a/g (16%), 11g (67%) and 11n (17%) of the total wireless LAN revenues.

Hon Hai Precision Industry was the only 10% customer for the period.

By the end of the quarter, Atheros had shipped over 20 million Ethernet ports to around 20 different customers on a cumulative basis. In 2006 they had just 1 customer for this product line.

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Revenues for the 4Q 2007 touched $2.96 billion up by around $260 million compared to 3Q 2007. Total shipments for the period were 2.36 million units (all 8” wafers now). Shipments for the quarter were up by around 5.9%. In 3Q 2007, the revenues had increased by 17% and the shipments by 20% which in this quarter has considerably gone down to 5.5% and 5.9% respectively. 68% of the quarter’s production was consumed by fabless/system customers while IDMs consumed the remaining 32%.

Geographically North America accounted for majority of the sales: 79%. Asia followed with 11% of total. Europe accounted for 8% of the sales. Japan contributed 2% of the sales.

Communications segment continues to be major sales contributor segment for TSMC. In 4Q 2007, communications chip contribution remained flat at 42% of the sales. Other segments contributing to the quarterly revenues were Computer 35% (up 3%), Consumer 15% (down 2%), Memory 3% (down 2%) and others 5% (up 1%).

In terms of chip technology, 90nm chips were the maximum revenue contributors for the quarter by fetching 29% of the revenues. In the quarter TSMC also announced shipping of one-millionth 12” 90nm wafer in less than 5 years. That was followed closely by 0.15/0.18um chips contributing 27%. The 0.11/0.13um, 0.25/0.35um, 65nm and 0.50um+ contributed 20%, 10%, 10% and 4% in that order. By chip technology 90nm chips saw some increase while others had a dip or remained flatter.

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Revenues for the 4Q 2007 were $35.3 million, up 5% sequentially. Revenue from multiservice access VoIP processors increased by 13% forming 28% of the quarter’s revenues. High-performance analog products showed an increase of 4% totaling contribution of 30% to the revenues while WAN communications remained flat by contributing 42% towards the overall revenues.

Geographically, Asia-Pacific contributed half of the revenues while Americas earned 39% of the revenues. Europe contributed 11%. Cisco was the only 10% end customer.

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Quarterly revenue for IDT was $201.2 million which reflects a decline of 5% qoq. Communications related revenues were approximately 32% of the total revenues which has declined from 34% last quarter. Other segments’ revenue shares were Consumer 19%, and Computing 43%. The rest came from audio segment.

The company continued their engagements with base station manufacturers on the wireless infrastructure side who are working on IDT’s Pre-processing Switch for next generation wireless rollouts.

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Revenues in Q4 were up by a modest 2% qoq which stood at $323 million. New category products saw revenues grow 9% sequentially in this quarter. In terms of product families, CPLDs declined by a percentile which are used in a number of communication devices. FPGAs however grew by 4%. Among the products Max II CPLDs registered record revenue in this quarter which was up by 8%.

Operating expenses were around 44% of the revenues. Of these $71 million were spent on R&D. Although operating expenses were cut by 3% the R&D spending went up by 6% reflecting better expense management on selling, management and other costs.

Communications segment was the strongest segment in the quarter. It grew by 4% while other segments were pretty flat. Telecom business was down but wireless and networking grew by double digits.

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Net revenues for the quarter were $540 million up by 8.6% yoy. Sequentially it was up by 3.3%. Communications contributed around $102.6 million. Other segments that contributed include Computing 31%, Consumer 29% and industrial 21%.

The net realizable bookings across segments were at $476.4 million down by 9% due to seasonality, fire at a major customers’ factory and the macro economic concerns of certain customers.

Maxim announced a cut in the R&D budget resulting in $15 million annual benefit towards operating expenses. It reduced investments in RF Wireless and Telecom. In the RF Wireless it announced discontinuation of investing into low-margin handset RF transceivers and in the area of Telecom it has decided to defer additional R&D investments till it sees market acceptance of recently introduced products.

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