Tag: 5G

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Electronic Components

Communications including 5G will drive the components market

components market

Communications including 5G will drive the components market

According to IC Insights, the communication sector’s share of integrated circuit sales reached 35% in 2020 and is expected to grow to 36.5% by 2025. For perspective, the automotive sector’s share of integrated circuit sales was 7.5% in 2020 and will grow to 9.8% by 2025 – significantly less than communications.

Industry tailwinds

What’s driving such high demand for ICs in the communications sector?

There are four big tailwinds:

  • 5G
  • Edge computing
  • Internet of Things
  • AI (artificial intelligence), MI (machine learning) and data analytics

5G

5G is the main driver for component demands with 5G infrastructure rollout happening slowly, but surely. We are nowhere near a complete version of 5G, and networks are in a race against time to deliver a reliable service.

The first step for networks is replacing low-band 4G spectrum, followed by mid-band spectrum that uses 2.5, 3.5 and 4.5 GHz, enabling faster data speeds. The final step is the rollout of millimetre wave, which enables true 5G speeds. Millimetre wave also happens to be a precursor for next generation 6G.

On top of 5G infrastructure rollout you have more 5G-enabled devices coming to market, such as smartphones, tablets, and laptops. Smartphones. in particular, are leading the way for 5G adoption, putting faster data in our hands.

The rapid growth in IC demand in the communications sector also stretches to other components like modems, memory, and antennas. 5G isn’t just an IC boon – it’s a boon for all the electronic components needed for 5G. 

Edge computing

Second to 5G we have edge computing, which by a miraculous twist of fate is needed to deliver a 5G experience (and needs a whole lot of components).

Edge computing puts computing capabilities relatively close to end users and/or IoT endpoints. In doing so, it reduces latency, while 5G delivers faster data speeds, providing a seamless experience on certain devices.

Internet of Things

IoT describes a network of connected smart devices that communicate with each other. For example, a vital sign monitor in a hospital could communicate with medicine dispensers and automate medicine dosages for doctors.

The Internet of Things has been talked about as a trend for several years, but we now have real applications that are useful.

AI (artificial intelligence), MI (machine learning) and data analytics

AI (artificial intelligence), MI (machine learning) and data analytics require enormous, powerful data centres to power them. These data centres require significant investment in chips, memory, and other electronic components.

Also, AI, MI and data analytics need cloud computing, edge computing and in some cases 5G to deliver a real-time experience.

The future

By 2025, the communications sector is forecast to have a 36.5% usage share of integrated circuits, making it the biggest consumer of semiconductors.

Demand for integrated circuits, discrete circuits, optoelectronics and sensors will grow to an all-time highs thanks to the industry tailwinds in this article. The future is bright, but to stay ahead, a robust supply chain will be needed.

Electronic components distributors like Lantek Corporation are helping supply the demand, while the communications sector battles to secure chip orders.

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Electronic Components

Active Electronic Components Market Growing Demand

Active Electronic Components Market Growing Demand

Active electronic component demand is soaring. The market is expected to grow by a compound annual growth rate of 4.8% during 2021-2026, fuelled by new technologies and faster and more globally available internet connectivity.

What’s driving it?

An explosion of new products with AI and IoT support and tailwinds like 5G are fuelling demand for active components.

Semiconductor devices, optoelectronic devices and display technologies are significant applications. Examples include smart home appliances, virtual reality headsets, connected medical devices and electronic ordering systems.

Here’s a non-exhaustive list of active components in high demand:

  • Diodes
  • Transistors
  • Integrated circuits
  • Optoelectronics
  • Sensors
  • Digital and analogue circuits
  • Batteries and power supplies
  • Generators
  • Vacuum tubes
  • CRT / LCD / VFD / TFT / LED displays

The increasing trends of the Internet of Things (IoT), automation, artificial intelligence, machine learning and virtual/augmented reality are expected to fuel demand for active electronic components for years to come.

Challenges lie ahead

This growing demand is not without its challenges. How will manufacturers get a hold of active electronic components if there isn’t enough to go around? Will geopolitical tensions affect supply? How will COVID-19 play a role in the future?

COVID-19

COVID-19 can create supply chain and market disruption and have a financial impact on firms and financial markets. If the virus persists in causing global disruption, this is likely to cause a shortage of active components in the future.

Geopolitical tensions

The US and China’s trade war in 2020 affected chip supplies around the world. Geopolitical tensions remain a risk in the future. Who knows if certain brands will be banned? It’s important that manufacturers stay in the loop to avoid supply chain problems.

Manufacturing bottlenecks

The world is advancing at a rapid rate and electronics components manufacturers are struggling to keep up. While investment in new factories is ongoing, demand may exceed manufacturing capacity, causing a shortage of components.

Price increases

Inflation is making everything more expensive. Add wildly fluctuating exchange rates and increasing demand for active components and you have the perfect recipe for price increases. This could cause a bidding war.

Active components and the future

The future is filled with more technology than you can imagine. Everything will be connected, including your car to your smartphone and your TV speakers to your smart home assistant (e.g. Alexa). Anything electronic can have a chip these days and you can bet innovators will find a way to make everything smart and connected.

With the active electronic components market predicted to increase in value significantly over the next five years, it is essential that companies have a reliable way to source the active components they need.

This is not a matter of beating the competition but a matter of staying operational amid impending shortages. The current chip shortage is a prime example of what can happen if a perfect storm of industry issues occurs.

If you need to source active electronic components, we can help. Email us if you have any questions or call us at 001 973-579-8100 to chat with our team.

 

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Electronic Components Technology

Active and passive components to see strong 5G-driven demand

5G-driven demand coming for Active & Passive Components

As the international rollout of 5G picks up pace, active and passive component demand is increasing at a rate of knots.

The buildout of 5G infrastructure requires significant investment in active and passive components for a wide range of different devices.

Examples include active antennas with integrated RF radio designs, small cell power base stations, C-RAN architecture and semiconductors.

One of the challenges faced with the 5G rollout this year has been COVID-19, which had immediate effects on global supply in demand. Some of the side effects included increased costs, a slowdown in logistics, and a squeeze on demand.

While these challenges were significant in early 2020 and are likely to remain for some time, the macroeconomics are unlikely to persist in their worst form.

Right now, the manufacturing sector in most countries is bouncing back fast and many manufacturers are having their best ever quarter.

A good example is Taiwan Semiconductor, who are the largest semiconductor foundry in the world. Then you have smaller but vital players like MaxLinear, who make wireless, PON, DSL, and terrestrial products for high-speed internet.

How 5G is driving demand for active and passive components

You can think of 5G as a tide that is going to raise all ships, and active and passive components manufacturers are the ships that will benefit from it most because they will make the components that build out the 5G infrastructure.

It’s easy to see why this is the case with a short list of active and passive components. Let’s start with examples of passive components first:

  • Resistors
  • Inductors
  • Capacitors
  • Transformers

Now let’s list a few active components:

  • Generators
  • Transistors
  • Diodes
  • Inductors / coils

Now let’s look at a few of the components that will build out 5G:

  • Semiconductors
  • Antennas
  • Radio towers
  • RF receivers
  • Fibreoptic cable

Looking at these lists, it’s easy to see why 5G is driving such strong demand for active and passive components.

Can the components sector keep pace?

There are so many different manufacturers of electronic components that it is unlikely that the rollout of 5G will trouble the manufacturing sector.

However, local supply problems may exist for some enterprises. For example, a supplier of radio frequency devices in China may have to temporary shut production at a factory due to a fire or a health hazard. This would affect supply.

The best way for those involved in the rollout of 5G to safeguard their supply of active and passive components is to use an electronic component distributor. Electronic component distributor specialise in the procurement and delivery of electronic components and parts, so they can ensure you always have what you need.

A faster, more connected future awaits

5G will revolutionise our use of the internet in more ways than one, but the buildout is going to take time. Demand for active and passive components is at an all-time high, and competition is increasing for the best components. Having a component distributor on your side is a good way to ensure you can meet the challenge.

Click Here to use our fast component search and enquire with us today!

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Electronic Components Technology

How “Chiplets” May Help the Future of Semiconductor Technology

How 'Chiplets' may help the future of Semiconductor Technology

The global demand for semiconductors is accelerating faster than a speeding bullet, with integrated device manufacturers, systems companies, and foundries like Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company making a killing.

This accelerating demand is largely fuelled by the rollout of 5G infrastructure and the increasingly connected devices we use on a daily basis. From semi-autonomous driving aids to the connected home, semiconductors power our digital lives. They are the brains of every smart electronics operation.

In the semiconductor industry, advancements come fast. Some companies have been painfully slow to react to change. Intel is a good example – they have fluffed the development of their 7nm chips and are stuck at 12nm, while AMD already has 7nm chips and is on course to deliver a 5nm chip. Nvidia is even further ahead.  

Chiplets

Chiplets are a proven (but niche) way for semiconductor developers to make semiconductors more efficient and easier to produce.

As semiconductors get more advanced, they get smaller. At a sub 10nm scale, foundries have to be spotlessly clean. This brings with it manufacturing complexities. Also, the smaller transistors get, the more likely they are to fail.

You can increase the yield of dies with small transistors by reducing overall size. But as you reduce the size of the die, you have less space for the transistors.

So, one solution is Chiplets. Chiplets are smaller functional dies that integrate multiple chiplets into a single semiconductor. By giving functions their own circuits (sub-circuits) we can remove design complexity and focus on efficiency.

Maximising yield reduces cost

Using chiplets maximises the yield of dies and reduces design complexity, which in turn reduces manufacturing cost. To give you an idea of by how much, AMD says chiplet designs can cut costs by more than half. 50%! That’s an astonishing saving and worth the effort if it also means keeping up with technological change.

(For what it’s worth, AMD uses chiplet design in its Zen 2 and Ryzen chips. The idea being that taking smaller dies and putting them together improves yield).

Intel is also a fan of chiplet design, and they have a vision for advancing it further, where instead of multiple dies, each IP has its own building block. This creates a more modular and flexible configuration. Here’s an illustration:

chiplet internal image

This is an exciting technology because the chiplets with IP/SOC are considerably smaller than the chiplets used in multiple dies. The benefit of this is you can configure the chiplets in more ways and maintain a common architecture.

Chiplets – the future, or not?

Chiplet design is already being used by AMD, and Nvidia has said they will go chiplet when it’s economically viable to do so. This means two of the three biggest CPU and GPU companies on the planet are on the chiplet train. As for Intel, they are too – but it looks like they will go their own way to build the chiplet model they want.

Clearly, chiplets are here to stay. Scaling chips with monolithic dies will always be a thing, but it gets expensive with advanced nodes. Chiplets are necessary to break up the cost and deliver the massive number of chips our connected world needs.

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Technology

5G Technology and drones – The future taking flight

5G Technology and Drones - The Future Taking Flight

The last decade has seen the commercial market for drones explode. The global drone market was estimated by PWC in 2016 to be worth just under £100 billion ($127bn) and that was 4 years ago, before the emergence of 5G technology.

Rapid advancements in the propulsion, navigation, sensory and battery systems that power drones has brought about the likes of drone delivery services, aerial photography, and a new way to conduct mountain search and rescue operations.

These varied examples of drone applications perfectly illustrates the real usefulness of drones. Key to their adoption has been lithium-ion batteries that charge rapidly and better navigation systems that enable pinpoint control.

However, as drones have been increasingly adopted, our data transfer needs have increased and 4G technology has been shown up to be less than ideal.  

The need for 5G

5G can theoretically reach speeds of 10 gigabits per second and it is expected to reliably offer 1 Gbit/s to 2 Gbit/s in a few years.

This is much faster than 4G. For drones, it means faster data transfer and data collection, enabling real-time analysis and access to big data files quickly.

However, while much has been made about the increased speed of 5G over 4G (it is up to 100 times faster than 4G) the real value for drones is the lower latency.

Latency is the lag that occurs when resources are requested over a network. For example, you might wish to check wind speed when flying, but when you request the data, it takes a few seconds to load. This delay is caused by latency across the network.

Latency for 4G is around 30 milliseconds, whereas with 5G it’s below 5 milliseconds. In a best case scenario, the latency can be 1 millisecond.

This latency improvement is massive for drones. It makes reliable live view and live streaming possible. Real-time footage becomes a reality. Load times become imperceptible and responsiveness increases between devices.

Another area where 5G benefits drones is the 5G New Radio interface, which enables a higher number of devices to be used in one area over a wave spectrum. This means more devices can be controlled to reduce congestion.

Meeting demand for 5G component sourcing

5G is an exciting technology but it is still in its infancy, and up until now drone architecture has been designed around 4G.

5G requires different components to handle the speed increase and demands placed over the network. Drones need a new architecture to transfer data in milliseconds and transmit high-definition footage in real-time.

In short, the current technology has to evolve.

Sourcing components like ESCs, flight controllers, GPS modules, receivers, antennas and batteries for 5G drones will become more challenging as more players in the market start to evolve their products to meet demand.

Day-to-day component sourcing will require good contacts in the industry just as it always has. But the race to 5G will accelerate demand and increase competition. This is where the value of an electronic components distributor like us comes in.

We can supply active, passive and electro-mechanical components, including 5G components, working directly for you to procure the best components at the lowest prices. If the future is 5G, we’ll help you meet it.