Power Management Chips Are Another Area That Will Evolve

It will happen more slowly that originally expected, but power management chips are going to see increasing sales and, thus, will lead to higher revenue.

The automotive, solar and wind turbine markets, as well as motor controls, are considered the most promising markets for power management semiconductors.

Also, mobile devices (notebooks, medical electronics, tablets), communications, grid upgrades and many other things will put emphasis on power efficiency.

Then again, it is accurate enough to say all the industry will strive to implement such things.

Unfortunately, the speed with which the adoption rate will rise is not going to be what analysts and the companies involved thought.

The main reason is the disaster that hit Japan in March and effectively crippled mostly every layer of the IT industry (not to mention killed thousands and caused a nuclear meltdown).

Not only did it lead to a tightening of consumer spending, it also reduced the speed of research and development.

Consumer demand is supposed to return in full only in 2014, which means that adoption rate of power management products will grow bit by bit in the meantime.

“Soon after the Japanese quake at the tail end of the first quarter, power management suffered a deceleration as manufacturing was halted in several areas of the country, home to many semiconductor plants and operations,” said Marijana Vukicevic, principal analyst for power management at IHS.

“The Japanese situation righted itself by September, but by then the industry was feeling yet another constraint—the decline in consumer spending that started in the middle of the year, a situation not likely to improve until after the first half of 2012.”

This isn't the only consequence of this year's weather phenomenons.

There is, in fact, a more immediate concern, that of hard disk drive shortage, brought about by the Thai floods that shut down facilities that supplied HDDs and HDD components.