Qualcomm and AMD Lead List of Top 25 Fabless IC Suppliers
IC Insights has released their rankings for the top 25 fabless IC suppliers for 2009 and some of the companies on the list might surprise you. The numbers are for IC sales only and do not include optoelectronic, sensor, or discrete semiconductor revenues. IC Insights considers a company fabless when it receives the majority of its finished wafer supply from IC foundries. As shown, there were nine fabless IC companies in 2009 that had sales of $1.0 billion or more. In late 1Q09, AMD became a fabless company by including its Dresden, Germany fabs as part of the GlobalFoundries spin-off. IC Insights has included all of AMD’s sales for 2009 in the chart. As shown, AMD now ranks as the second largest fabless IC company in the world behind only Qualcomm. NVIDIA is now ranked fifth after a decline of 14%. NVIDIA was ranked second back in 2007 and has fallen to fifth place now.
Not including AMD, the top 10 fabless companies’ sales, in total, declined 4% in 2009 while the remainder of the fabless companies’ IC sales dropped 13%! Thus, the top 10 share of total fabless company IC sales rose to 65% in 2009, up five points from 2007. As the barriers to entry (i.e., high design costs, increasingly difficult access to venture capital money, etc.) rise, it appears that the fabless IC supplier listing will continue to become more “top-heavy” in the future
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