Tablet and e-reader chip market grew by 2,000% last year

Where the growth is

Market researcher IDC has revealed that worldwide revenues for media tablet and e-reader semiconductors grew by over 2,000 percent last year to $3.3 billion. Furthermore it expects those revenues to grow by a further 120 percent this year.

On one level this stat is no great surprise, given that the ‘media tablet' only came into existence with the launch of the iPad in early 2010. But e-readers had been around for a while and it does at least illustrate how the tablet market exploded last year.

"The opportunity for semiconductors in media tablets and e-readers has exploded and semiconductor suppliers are scrambling to bring to market semiconductor and software platforms to enable these products," said Michael J. Palma, research manager at IDC. "Beyond semiconductors, these suppliers are also providing OEMs with much of the system software as well as support for access into app stores, which is helping to dramatically shorten product design cycles."

Other highlights of IDC's report include the confirmation that ARM architecture accounts for 99 percent of the application processors in tablet-sized devices, and it doesn't expect x86 or MIPS to do much about that in the next few years. The average bill of materials (BOM) of tablets is 50 percent more than e-readers, which is interesting because they cost two or three times as much, meaning most e-readers are probably sold as loss-leaders.

Here's IDC's table showing the breakdown of tablet-related components, we added the ‘%of total' column. As you can see storage and memory currently occupies a bit chunck of the BOM, but that proportion is expected to shrink over time as the price of Flash and DRAM falls.