China Consumer MCU Market Report

As one of the world's most important manufacturing bases, China consumer electronics industry has been remarkably improved both in quantity and in the structure of "quality"; more and more high-end consumer electronics products are produced in China, and the market demand for MCU is gradually promoted. Viewing from the scale, China's consumer electronics application MCU market will maintain the growing momentum in the forthcoming years: the CAGR (Compound Annual Growth Rate) will reach 22.1% in 2005-2010, the sales value is expected to reach RMB 34.59 billion by 2010.

In the forthcoming years, the vigorous demand for China's high-end white household appliances and digital consumer electronics products including iDTV (integrated digital TV) and electronics game players will definitely boost the demand for 16-bit and 32-bit high-end MCU as well as their corresponding market shares.

Meanwhile, black household appliances including ordinary air condition, washing machine, refrigerator, color TV, home theater system and radio-broadcast receiver combined with sound recording and reproducing apparatus will maintain comparatively large industry scale, which will give China's major consumer MCU market share to 8-bit MCU. In addition, driven by the expansion and increment of both export and domestic markets, China's output of small-size household appliances, such as dust collector, smart electric rice cookers, fanner and remote control, will also keep growing rapidly, thus the sales volume of low-end 4-bit MCU will be promoted vigorously. As for the sales volume, 4-bit MCU still enjoys enormous demand, and will share uppermost proportion in China consumer MCU market in the near future.

In terms of technical development trend, MCU product will evolve from OTP ROM MCU to Flash MCU. Since Flash MCU combines the cost advantage of OTP memory and the programmable feature of EEPROM, it will take shorter period to launch products into the market, and the product can be upgraded on the spot; therefore, Flash MCU becomes more and more popular among manufacturers. Besides, after integrating Flash, MCU has larger flexibility, which is convenient for expanding the application scope. Additionally, integrating Flash can also reduce the cost; at present, flash memory can be smaller and cheaper than traditional OTP EPROM, and sometimes embedded flash memory is more competitive than ROM.

Currently, Flash MCU is mainly applied in automobile electronics, systemic equipments and industrial control, rarely used in consumer electronics products. However, in order to reduce the cost and realize more complex function, it's believed that along with the continuous function expansion of consumer electronics products in the future years, the market demand of Flash MCU will be gradually escalated. In this sense, integrated flash memory will become a trend of consumer MCU market, and products with larger memory capacity will be more competitive.