Freescale Semiconductor announced that market research firm, IDC has ranked it number one in the communications processor market with 52 percent market share as compared to 25 percent of its nearest competitor.

Freescale attributes the success to the popularity of its PowerQUICC® product line which has been in existence since the past decade. Freescale says that with the enhancement of this product line to next generation level, developers can migrate to multicore in a better way.

“Our studies show that Freescale remains the longstanding leader in the communications processor market,” said Aileen Arcilla, senior semiconductor research analyst for IDC. “Freescale continues to leverage the popularity of PowerQUICC processors with the industry’s leading equipment manufacturers and their network carrier customers and will seek to maintain its leadership with the forthcoming QorIQ line of multicore devices. In 2009 and beyond, Freescale and its competitors will need to monitor the acceptance of multicore as they all attempt to gain market share in one of the very few growing semiconductor market segments.”

IDC’s report titled, Worldwide Telecom/Datacom Semiconductor Vendor Share forecasts growth for the global telecom/datacom semiconductor market over the next five years due to the reason that carriers will continue to replace legacy infrastructure to support the growing volume and varying mix of network traffic.