As mobile grows, Fairchild responds

Fairchild Semiconductor announced last week that it was expanding its product portfolio to feature more semiconductor solutions aimed at a burgeoning mobile handset market.

Among the newcomers were the somewhat recently announced FT8010, which is a restart timer specifically aimed at the “White Screen of Death,” and the FAN5362, which the company said would boost battery life while taking up less room on already-crowded mobile circuit boards.

Other Fairchild devices aimed at mobile handsets include USB transceivers; logic-level translators; audio amplifying, detecting, and routing solutions; interface serialization semiconductors; memory routing chips; SIM card switching and dual SIM interface support devices; video routing and isolation solutions; and, of course, power management chips like buck converters, boost converters, LED drivers, low-voltage MOSFETs, and load switches.

“A growing percentage of the mobile handsets shipped today are higher end, feature-rich phones and 'smartphones' that heavily rely on the type of semiconductor solutions Fairchild develops,” said Bob Conrad, a Fairchild vice president in the company's official announcement. “Fairchild is intensely focused on specific analog and power functions that define user satisfaction and market success, and this commitment — together with our history with device manufacturers—positions us to meet the evolving demands of the market with new technologies that make a difference in mobile designs.”

Fairchild's move toward mobile matches market and analyst expectations for the mobile segment. For example, Gartner recently estimated that some 80 million smart phones and 417 million total mobile devices were shipped in the third quarter of 2010. By comparison, Gartner said that just 41 million smart phones and 308 total mobile devices had shipped in the same calendar quarter of 2009, marking significant growth in smart-phone shipments and in smart-phone shipments as a percentage of total mobile terminal shipments.

Other types of mobile devices, like so-called e-readers, may also have an effect on the semiconductor market generally and mobile-specific semiconductors in particular as In-Stat recently predicted that Amazon's Kindle, Barnes & Noble's Nook, and similar e-readers would consume more than $1 billion worth of semiconductors in 2011.

Fairchild's mobile expansion seems to be both timely for the company and the engineers and OEMs it serves.

Armando Roggio