TrendForce said that due to the impact of the epidemic in the first half of 2020, it was expected to have a great negative impact on the IC design industry. However, benefiting from the surge in demand for notebook computers and Netcom products driven by telecommuting and online teaching, terminal system manufacturers have issued large orders to IC designers, providing a strong boost to the growth of the overall IC design industry in 2020.

As you can see, among the top ten IC designers,$Qualcomm Inc (QCOM.US) $、$NVIDIA Corp (NVDA.US) $, MediaTek,$Advanced Micro Devices Inc (AMD.US) $, Lianyong Technology and Ruiyu Semiconductor all maintained a growth rate of more than 30%, among which NVIDIA benefited from the increased demand for game graphics cards and data centers, with the fastest year-on-year growth in revenue, reaching 52.2%. by contrast,$Broadcom Ltd (AVGO.US) $、$Maywell Technology (MRVL.US) $Only single-digit growth has been maintained. And$Cyrus (XLNX.US) $And Dialog are the only two companies in the top ten that have seen a decline in year-on-year performance.

According to TrendForce analysis, there are two major reasons why Qualcomm Inc beat Broadcom Ltd to win the first place in the world:

First, the demand for network communications has increased sharply, and secondly, Qualcomm Inc's baseband processor products have returned to Apple Inc's supply chain. In addition, Huawei's mobile phone shipments have been blocked by the US ban on Huawei. Other mobile phone operators are competing to eat the market vacated by Huawei, thus boosting Qualcomm Inc's revenue performance in 2020.

Second, Broadcom Ltd suppressed revenue performance in the first half of 2020 due to Sino-US trade frictions, but in the second half of the year, with mobile phone RF components entering Apple Inc's supply chain, revenue grew only slightly under mutual influence, so he retreated to second place.

As a result of the acquisition of Mellanox, NVIDIA has greatly enhanced the integrity of the data center solution, with revenue of nearly US $6.4 billion in the data center market, with an annual growth rate of 121.2%. Driven by the blessing of the data center and the robust performance of game graphics cards, NVIDIA revenue has soared compared with the same period last year.

MediaTek also benefited from the rapid increase in demand for Netcom and laptops, the effectiveness of 5G mobile phone processor product strategy, and the improvement of Netcom product specifications and cost structure optimization. The overall annual revenue growth rate jumped to 37.3% from 1% in 2019.

Lianyong's revenue is boosted by the Sino-US trade friction and the housing economy derived from the epidemic, which drives both IC and TV chips to perform well, with an annual growth rate of 30.1%.

In addition to the strong demand for Netcom and notebook products, Ruiyu's revenue is also excellent, with an annual growth of 34.1%, such as audio and Bluetooth chips.

With Intel Corp's 10nm production capacity limited, AMD achieved eye-catching sales results in 2020 with processor products for laptops, desktop PC and servers, boosting revenue to $9.7 billion, with an annual growth rate of 45 per cent.

Affected by trade frictions between the United States and China, Xilinx's revenue declined by 5.6% for the whole year. However, revenue changes in the observation quarter have gradually stabilized, which shows that Sailings has gradually got rid of the haze of Sino-US trade frictions.

Looking forward to 2021, although countries around the world have begun to be vaccinated against COVID-19, the epidemic has not slowed down in the first quarter, and the delivery momentum of terminal operators still exists. Coupled with the fact that foundry capacity continues to be fully loaded, it is inevitable that supply falls short of demand throughout the year. Therefore, under the premise of IC designers ensuring that the production capacity is sufficient for production, IC prices may rise and boost the overall IC industry revenue performance in 2021.