A recent Frost & Sullivan survey on mobile phone penetration rate substantiates the fact that the expanding horizons of handset business day-by-day in markets like India and China have greater impact on the growth of RF semiconductor markets.

“Mobile handsets have evolved rapidly, from a simple and voice-only device to a sophisticated device that supports voice, high-speed data, and other applications such as global positioning system (GPS) and Bluetooth,” says Frost & Sullivan Research Analyst Gokul Ramanujam. “The adoption of 3G technology has also aided handset and RF semiconductor manufacturers with 3G phones requiring a design with higher complexity.”

Another research study conducted by Frost & Sullivan on World Handset RF semiconductor markets reveals that the RF transceivers market generated the most revenues compared with all segments and the total revenues constituted to $3.045 billion in 2006 which is likely to increase to $5.95 billion in 2010.

Today, as we witness a tremendous and consistent growth of RF handset semiconductor market, major share comes from the increasing demand for value packed advanced handsets. Moreover, with fourth-generation technology (4G) and 3G long-term evolution (LTE) in the developmental stages, this market will likely grow exponentially in the future. And these greater demands for feature rich handsets have created challenging pressure on both handset manufacturers and RF semiconductor companies to offer the best innovative technologies.

“To enable this scenario, the kind of scaling proposed by Moore’s Law would be ideal, but is not realistically possible in all cases,” says Gokul. “A balance of all factors such as reduced component count, combined with cost effectiveness, is likely to assist RF semiconductor manufacturers in revenue generation.”