2011 Starts Well for Chips, Sales Rise in January

Each month, market analysts take the time to see how things progressed on each market segment during the previous one, and it seems that semiconductors have been doing well recently, both sequentially and on-year.

Some consumers may know of how different segments of the semiconductor industry are behaving and/or have behaved over the past months.

CPU/APU sales, for instance, seem to be going strong, what with the new units from AMD and Intel, and the same (more or less) can be said about GPUs.

Meanwhile, NAND Flash chip shipments are being encouraged because of how tablets are getting widespread.

DRAM chips, on the other hand, kept going down in terms of ASPs (average selling prices) for months before they hit a bottom of sorts last month (February).

Overall, however, it appears that the chip industry actually grew, during January at least, when it returned 1.5% higher sales than in December, 2010, even though the holiday season should have given the closing month of last year a clear advantage.

Basically, the total sum was of $25.5 billion, which was 14% more than what January 2010 brought in.

"The industry will continue to benefit from steady growth, as semiconductor content increases in a wide range of products,” said Brian Toohey, president, Semiconductor Industry Association.

“The impressive growth in semiconductor sales over the past year has been driven by strong demand across all major end markets as the products we use everyday become smarter, faster, and less expensive."

"We are especially encouraged by this trend in the industrial and automotive sectors, which saw significant growth," he added.

As far as last year goes, semiconductor sales in the industrial and automotive sectors grew by 50% and 44%, respectively, year-over-year.

This contributed to the 32 percent year-over-year overall rise “across all verticals,” as the SIA release puts it (consumer, automotive, computer, industrial, communications and government applications).