MPEG IC market to hit 1.6b in 2011

BANGALORE: With video capture and playback now appearing in previously untapped markets, the MPEG video IC market has plenty of room for growth, reports In-Stat www.in-stat.com. MPEG IC unit shipments will grow from 649 million in 2006 to 1.6 billion in 2011, the high-tech market research firm says. MPEG video ICs are used in the compression and decompression of video streams in many consumer devices from small mobile handsets to large digital TV sets.

Unit shipments for MPEG-2/4 ASP encoder and decoder ICs will grow slowly if at all in the future as H.264 encoder and decoder ICs experience much higher growth rates. Revenue in the MPEG-2/4 ASP encoder and decoder IC markets will decline, as there is enormous price pressure in these markets and a lot of competitors.

Recent research by In-Stat found the following:

• The advent of H.264 has given rise to startups like Ambarella and Horizon Semiconductor, while 2006 saw the first mobile MPEG-4 IC shipments from Rockchip, MtekVision, and Chipnuts.
• MediaTek was again the top supplier in 2006 of MPEG-2 DVD decoder ICs, LSI Logic the top supplier of MPEG-2 encoder ICs, and STMicroelectronics was the top supplier of MPEG-2 MP@ML set top box decoder ICs and H.264 decoder ICs.