According to a report published by Yole Développement (Yole) titled RF Power Market and Technologies 2017: GaN, GaAs and LDMOS. The revolutionary transition toward 5G implementation in the next five years will dramatically reshape the RF technology landscape. This will not only be true for smartphone applications but RF telecommunication infrastructure applications above 3W and for 5G. These applications will offer enormous business opportunities for compound semiconductors in this RF power market.
The report expects the RF power market to grow strongly in coming years with increasing demand for telecom base station upgrades and small cell implementations. Overall market revenue could increase 75% between 2016 and the end of 2022, posting a 9.8% CAGR during this period. This report predicts that the RF power market will reach more than US $2.5 billion in 2022, increasing from US$1.5 billion in 2016. The market is now talking about transitioning to 5G, though the standard is not set, there are some things that we know for sure: the new radio network will require more devices and higher frequencies. Chip providers therefore have a tremendous opportunity here, especially the manufacturers of RF power semiconductors.
Yole estimates the market size of telecom infrastructure including base stations and wireless backhaul to account for about half of the total market size of RF Power Devices. It will continue growing fast at an expected 12.5% CAGR for base stations and 5.3% CAGR for telecom backhaul over 2016-2022.
In the meantime, defense applications are also providing good opportunities for RF power devices, as there is a trend of replacing old vacuum tube designs with solid-state technologies exploiting GaAs and GaN. These new technologies provide better performance, reduced size as well as robustness in various use cases. Therefore, they are gradually taking more market share. This market segment’s revenue will increase by around 20% by 2022 with a 4.3% CAGR between 2016 and 2022.
In this new report, Yole has researched a number of RF power market segments including telecom and military and many others. This report offers a complete analysis of the competitive landscape with RF power players such as NXP, Ampleon, Qorvo, Infineon, Sumitomo Electric, M-A/COM, Wolfspeed, UMS, Analog Devices. Yole reviews in details the devices developed and implemented in power amplifier applications and proposes a detailed comparison of the technology landscapes for LDMOS , GaAs , GaN and SiGe. Click here to download the report.