Microwave Engineering Europe - January/February 2009 - (Page 9)

NEWS 9 GPS, Wi-Fi growth to defy ‘09 downturn, say analysts The markets for chips focusing on the Wi-Fi and GPS navigation and location technology sectors could defy the semiconductor downturn during the year, according to two separate reports. IMS (Wellingborough, England) suggests the GPS market will grow by over $200 million over the next 12 months. “In 2009 GPS will begin to penetrate into a range of vertical markets, such as cameras, laptops, sporting equipment and ﬁrst responder radios. This will help to drive shipment growth of over 25 percent yearon-year,” according to IMS Research analyst, Tom Arran. The market researchers suggest 2009 will be a reasonable but not booming year for GPS shipments, but that the sector will have a 21.2 percent Compound Annual Growth Rate (CAGR) between 2008 and 2013. “Location is emerging as a key component of future offerings from companies such as Google, Microsoft, Apple, Nokia, Intel, Mozilla and Ericsson. This will enable a host of new services across all key vertical markets, which in turn will further drive the uptake of GPS,” said Arran. However, he notes there are numerous challenges ahead and the GPS market will need to mature before it breaks the 500 million units per year barrier. One of the main issues, he warns, is poor performance in challenging environments. “GPS manufacturers need to start seriously considering hybrid location in their offering,” said Arran. Meanwhile, the Wi-Fi Alliance suggests growth in WLAN chipsets reached 26 percent in 2008, and similar growth can Traditional Spectrum Analyzer 5 seconds be achieved this year, mostly driven by consumer and entertainment products. According to In-Stat, which researched the market on behalf of the Alliance, the year-on-year growth to 387 million chipsets came from a mix of consumer and enterprise sectors, especially those moving towards the 802.11n standard. The growth was particularly notable in WiFi enabled smartphones, netbooks and media devices. Dual-mode smartphones are said to have grown twice as fast as the high end handset category as a whole. In-Stat expects the most resilient Wi-Fi products during 2009 to be, again, dual-mode handsets, as well as portable consumer electronic devices, mobile PCs and ﬁxed products for fast, multimedia home networking. Just about all handheld gaming devices that will be shipped in 2009 are expected to integrate Wi-Fi capability. The Alliance also believes the use of Wi-Fi for device-todevice connectivity and syncing on the ﬂ y will grow signiﬁcantly this year. Proprietary implementations of this capability are just beginning to take off, and the industry body is working to develop a standard approach, which will come to market in 2010. www.mwee.com/212900028 Tektronix 5 seconds The two screens represent a traditional swept tuned spectrum analyzer and a Tektronix Real-Time Spectrum Analyzer running DPX™, each detecting an identical signal that changes every 1.28 seconds. Tektronix DPX Technology—See What You’ve Been Missing. Discover what’s real with Tektronix DPX™ Technology. Now you can see your time-varying signals live with DPX technology, available on all Real-Time Spectrum Analyzers from Tektronix. DPX displays a live RF view of your signal changing over time. It shows you RF signal characteristics that are practically invisible with prior architectures. See a live RF demo www.tektronix.com/rtsa-dpx © 2009 Tektronix. All rights reserved. Tektronix products are covered by U.S. and foreign patents, issued and pending. TEKTRONIX and the Tektronix logo are registered trademarks of Tektronix, Inc. Microwave Engineering Europe ● January/February 2009 ● www.mwee.com http://www.tektronix.com/rtsa-dpx http://www.tektronix.com/rtsa-dpx http://www.mwee.com/212900028 http://www.mwee.com

Table of Contents Feed for the Digital Edition of Microwave Engineering Europe - January/February 2009

Microwave Engineering Europe - January 2009 News Contents Comment Using KPIs to Ensure Quality in a Converging Network Amplifier Error Vector Magnitude Characterisation Using High-Speed Modular PXI Instruments GPS: Making a Play for Femtocells Accelerating Global WiMAX Adoption: The Move to Picocell and Femtocell Base Stations Addressing PA Efficiency for Multi-Mode Wideband Handset Applications Wi-Fi: Mobile Feature or Fundamental RAN? Products Calendar

Microwave Engineering Europe - January/February 2009

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