Global semiconductor revenue to hit $451 bn in 2018: Gartner

Worldwide semiconductor revenue is forecast to total $451 billion in 2018, an increase of 7.5 percent from $419 billion in 2017, a Gartner forecast said on Wednesday.

This represents a near doubling of Gartner's previous estimate of 4 per cent growth for 2018.

"Gartner has increased the outlook for 2018 by $23.6 billion compared with the previous forecast, of which the memory market accounts for $19.5 billion. Price increases for both DRAM and NAND flash memory are raising the outlook for the overall semiconductor market," Ben Lee, Principal Research Analyst at Gartner, said in a statement.

However, these price increases will put pressure on margins for system vendors of key semiconductor demand drivers, including smartphones, PCs and servers.

On January 3, a security vulnerability that spans all microprocessor vendors was revealed, impacting nearly all types of personal and data centre computing devices.

While this is an obscure security vulnerability that is difficult to achieve, Gartner said, the potential of a high-impact security issue cannot be ignored and must be mitigated.

"The current mitigation solution is via firmware and software updates, and has a potential processor performance impact. This may result in an increased demand for high-performance data centre processors in the short term," said Alan Priestley, research director at Gartner.

Gartner expects that in the longer term, microprocessor architectures will be redesigned, reducing the performance impact of the software mitigations and limiting the long-term forecast impact, he added.

--IANS

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