IC Insights: IC Content in Cellular Phones to Surge

IC Insights has issued a report that forecasts by 2009, 80 percent of cell phone handset sales will be replacement sales, and will "tend to be "full-featured" and relatively expensive."

Based on this assumption, IC Insights predicts "the IC dollar content per cellular phone is expected to increase from $38.54 in 2005 to $44.73 in 2009. As a result, the IC content percentage of the total handset price is forecast to rise from 28% in 2004 to 37% in 2009."

According to IC Insights, "higher levels of IC integration have also served to incorporate some of the handset functions typically performed by passives and discrete devices. This movement from passive and discrete devices to ICs, coupled with handset price declines, is forecast to help boost the IC percentage content of a handset through 2009."

IC Insights finds "there is almost a 3:1 difference in IC content in a high-end cellular phone (including a camera) as compared to a "basic" model. The use of a camera chip, Bluetooth module, and multimedia processor in a 2.5G-phone means more than four times the memory device cost. Also, many high-end phones require significantly more DRAM in addition to flash memory."