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Portsmouth, England - A report from semiconductor research firm Semicast sees substantial revenue growth for 32-bit MCUs/MPUs in the industrial and medical sector, along with a shift in demand toward ARM-based controllers.
Traditionally, demand for processing performance in the industrial and medical sector has centered on x86-based applications, such as ATMs, EPOS, vending machines, and SBCs, which typically use a combination of an Intel processor, Microsoft Windows and proprietary middleware. Semicast's report - "Industrial/Medical Semiconductor Service" - doesn't see this changing anytime soon, and expects continued ongoing demand for these "Wintel" applications for the foreseeable future.
At the same time, 32-bit processors have represented a substantial segment of the industrial processing market for many years, with Freescale's ColdFire being the most established, according to the report. However, Semicast expects ColdFire to lose market share as other 32-bit architectures record higher growth.
The architecture to register the highest growth over the medium term is likely to be ARM, says Semicast, in part due to the increasing number of suppliers supporting the architecture in the industrial sector, including Atmel, Marvell, NXP, STMicroelectronics and Toshiba, with focused suppliers such as Cirrus Logic, Luminary Micro and Zilog adding their weight as well. Additional support is coming from programmable logic makers Actel and Altera, who offer FPGAs that support the ARM Cortex M1 core.
According to Semicast, some of the applications where ARM has, or is forecast to take, considerable market share include consumer medical, alarm panels, motor control, EFT transaction terminals, handheld data terminals and CCTV cameras. The research firm also expects the introduction of MCUs based on the Cortex M3 core to provide a substantial boost to the adoption of ARM in the industrial sector by enabling ARM-based controllers to be introduced with low cost, low power consumption and mid-range performance.
Such controllers may find use in applications in place of 16-bit MCUs, which Semicast suggests may segment the industrial MCU market into 8-bit for low-cost, low-performance applications, with 32-bit control from the mid-range up. The report concludes that while ARM will make inroads, it will not do so unchallenged, as Microchip (MIPS-based PIC32) Renesas (SuperH), Freescale and AMCC (both Power Architecture) will all be looking at opportunities in the industrial sector.
Related links:
"Industrial/Medical Semiconductor Service" report brochure (PDF)
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