Merchant Traffic Manager market to grow at 42% yearly

Although it is probably one of the least known areas of merchant silicon, the Merchant Traffic Manager (MTM) market has been doing fairly well in the face of the economic down turn of the last few years, reports In-Stat/MDR. The high-tech market research firm projects that this market should continue to out pace the combined Metro and Core Network Processor Unit (NPU) market by a ratio of nearly 2:1, for the foreseeable future, and should have faster growth rates than most of the other silicon markets.

With a Compound Annual Growth Rate of roughly 42% from 2002 to 2007, the MTM market will cross 9-digits in 2003 and continue on to more than half of a billion dollars by the end of 2007. On the downside, the penetration rate for MTMs in the overall market is still only 8%. Unfortunately, the other 92% of the market is currently being held by Application Specific Integrated Circuits (ASICs) that are usually being designed internally within the OEM. Agere is clearly the 800-pound gorilla in this market, garnering 51% of the market share. AMCC comes in second.