LONDON, UK: As well as providing significant opportunities for carriers and OEMs alike, femtocells look set to be a lucrative opportunity for semiconductor vendors.

A new Research Brief from ABI Research finds that the market is primed to grow from just under $72 million in 2008 to over $1.8 billion in 2013, at a CAGR of over 300 percent over that time period. The significant promise associated with this market is drawing more and more silicon vendors into this market, including large vendors such as Freescale and Qualcomm.

However, addressing this market is far from straightforward.

Vice president and research director Stuart Carlaw says: "Although there's no doubt about the significant potential of this market, it should be addressed with great wariness. Semiconductor vendors will bear the brunt of huge pressures from price declines. In order to meet those price declines there is actually a paradoxical need to invest huge sums in designing optimized and dedicated silicon for the femtocell market."

This puts silicon companies in the strange situation where it will actually cost a princely sum to get any where near the lucrative pot of gold at the end of the figurative rainbow, and that the decision to invest in the technology must be made at a time of uncertainty over the future direction of the market.

Questions of technology, air interface, semiconductor approach, multimodality, integration, route to market, business model, and more all remain unresolved.