Who Makes What: Electronic Chips

Of the 43,000-plus documents that Light Reading has published since its inception, its taxonomies stand out in terms of how many people have read them. Each one has garnered hundreds of thousands of page views and has become a reference work for the whole telecom industry.

We're now planning to repeat the exercise, this time in the field of chips rather than systems – and we think the results will have an even bigger influence.
Here's why:

It all adds up to a market that's on the move – one that's tough to keep track of in terms of figuring out which companies to shortlist as potential chip suppliers, what the competition is up to, and ultimately, which are likely to be the winners and losers among telecom chip manufacturers.

That's where this report comes in. On the following pages, we've identified and described 20 different categories of networking chips, one per page. Each page kicks off with a brief definition of the product category, and then lists the vendors that fall into that category.

Your Input

As with the equipment taxonomy published a few months ago (Who Makes What: Equipment 2003), this is just a starting point. We now need you to dive in and suggest additions, corrections, and revisions to this report, which is a living document. In other words, we'll update it regularly to reflect your input.

In order to make suggestions, we'd prefer you use the message boards, so that everyone can participate in discussions. However, if you need to keep your communications private, please send them to [email protected] and include Who Makes What in the subject field so we can filter it into a special folder.

Feel free to go beyond pointing to company names we may have mistakenly omitted. We're also interested in suggestions for further product categories (we'll add pages if necessary) and proposals for improving our category definitions.To encourage discussion, we've created a separate message board for each page. If your comment is general, please use the message board here, following this introduction. If it concerns one particular category of chips, please use the message board relating to that category, at the foot of the relevant page.

Market Perception Survey

As with the equipment taxonomy, this report is Stage 1 of a project. Stage 2 will be an online market perception survey that aims to find out which vendors are considered to be market leaders in each product category.

We'll roll out the survey once we've given you plenty of time to help us ensure that this report delivers the most comprehensive taxonomy of the telecom chip market every published.

Click on these hyperlinks to go directly to the section of interest:

Access/Enterprise

Sonet Transport

Packet/Cell Transport

Custom Silicon

— Pauline Rigby, Senior Editor, Light Reading
http://www.lightreading.com

Last UPDATED 11/30/2003 5:52PM