Enthusiasm is still building around the nascent MPEG-4 AVC market, but the use of advanced video decoders does not mean that MPEG-2-only decoders will disappear from the market soon, reports In-Stat. In fact, MPEG-2 unit shipments are expected to experience growth until 2009, though declining ASPs for MPEG-2 solutions will cause revenues to decline, the high-tech market research firm says. "Buzz is really all there is to MPEG-4 AVC currently," says Michelle Abraham, In-Stat analyst. "We expect the market will be small in 2005, as many decoder IC suppliers have been conducting interoperability testing with encoder suppliers. We expect widespread availability of MPEG-4 AVC decoder ICs beginning in 2006." The worldwide MPEG Video IC market revenues for 2004 were US$ 3.8 billion. MPEG-4 Video ICs will appear in more and more mobile handsets as mobile video delivery systems based on standards like DVB-H and DMB are deployed around the world. In the MPEG-2 consumer encoder IC market, NEC Electronics had the top unit share in 2004 for the second year in a row, mainly due to its design wins in DVD recorders. STMicroelectronics had the highest MPEG Video IC revenue again in 2004, for the fifth straight year.
Semiconductor forecasts rarely move enough to reshape an enterprise boardroom budget conversation. Omdia's latest worldwide market study findings does exactly that. The research firm has raised its 2026 global semiconductor revenue forecast to 94.1 percent year-over-year growth, an increase driven almost entirely by memory pricing tied to artificial intelligence infrastructure. For technology executives, the number itself matters less than what sits underneath it. Applied-AI demand has now outrun the industry's capacity to produce and package the chips it needs, and Omdia expects that imbalance to persist through early 2027. The Semiconductor Forecast Revision Memory integrated circuits, DRAM and NAND combined, are now projected to account for more than 50 percent of total semiconductor revenue in 2026. That threshold has rarely been crossed in the industry's history. It marks a structural shift in where chip economics get decided. Logic used to set the pace of the industr...