Taipei, Jan. 25, 2010 (CENS)--MediaTek Inc., Taiwan`s No.1 fabless chip house, advanced one more notch to No.4 on IC Insights` 2009 top-10 fabless ranking list from a year earlier, according to the market consulting firm.

IC Insights` statistics showed that MediaTek`s 2009 sales surged 22% from 2008 to US$3.5 billion, representing the strongest growth rate among the top 10 firms. Taiwan`s industry watchers ascribed the hefty growth mostly to the company`s unmatched sales of 2.5-generation mobile phone chips in mainland China.

On the list, wireless chip design houses snatched three of the top five places, suggesting the market for mobile phones remains strong worldwide. The other two wireless design houses are Qualcomm and Broadcom.

IC Insights` tallies indicated that only seven of the world`s top 25 fabless houses posted sales growth last year, including Qualcomm, MediaTek, Realtek Semiconductor, Mstar Semiconductor, Atheros, Silicon Labs and Richtek Technology.

A first-time-rated company, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) ranked No.2 as a result of spinning off its pure manufacturing operation as independent foundry named GlobalFoundries.

IC Insights considers a company fabless when it receives the majority of its finished wafer supply from IC foundries and only tracks the companies` sales from IC, excluding optoelectronic, sensor, and discrete semiconductor revenues.

The company`s 2009 statistic shows only nine of the rated companies had revenue exceeding US$1 billion.

Not including AMD, the top 10 fabless companies` aggregate sales declined 4% in 2009 while the rest of the fabless companies` IC sales dropped 13%, reflecting the predicament of the 2009 semiconductor market. However, the total share of the top 10 fabless sales rose to 65% in 2009, up five percentage points from 2007.

(by Ken Liu)