RF giant Qorvo wants to tear off the "mobile" label amid IoT and smart car boom

"Previously, when people mentioned Qorvo, they would think of it as a company that does RF, but in fact, we have continued to make acquisitions over the past few years, and our product range has expanded to include communications connectivity and power supplies." Qorvo's external director told Interface News.

Qorvo has quite a long history of development, which came from the merger of two veteran semiconductor manufacturers, Transcend Semiconductor (TriQuint) and Fusion Semiconductor (RFMD) in 2015, and has become the market leader in the field of RF, with full RF product lines of antennas, power amplifiers, filters and RF switches, with third-generation semiconductor technologies such as GaAs and GaN.

In electronic products and communication base stations, RF front-end is responsible for RF transceiver, frequency synthesis and power amplification. Over the past decade or so, benefiting from the rise of smartphones, RF chips have become a star type in the semiconductor industry. Entering the 5G era, due to the high requirements of 5G technology for communication capabilities, making supporting RF chip demand once a significant increase. According to market research firm Yole, the global RF front-end market in 2022 is occupied by Broadcom (19%), Qualcomm (17%), Qorvo (15%), Skyworks (15%) and Murata (14%), with the five major vendors together occupying more than 80% of the market share.

However, RF front-end supply and demand due to communications technology iterations have cyclical characteristics, making Qorvo began to focus on a broad market outside of mobile products.

Yole data shows that the market for RF front-end in 2021 is more than $19 billion, and in 2022, due to the decline of the cell phone market, the RF front-end market size is similar to the market in 2021. At the same time, with increased competition in the consumer electronics market such as cell phones and wearable, major RF chip companies in the case of weak demand for smartphones and 5G network construction near the top, the market for RF front-end is expected to grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 5.8% by 2028, which has slowed down significantly from the initial growth rate of 5G.

Like other cell phone supply chain companies, Qorvo is facing inventory troubles. In its last quarterly earnings report, Qorvo said the sluggish demand and inventory adjustment in the cell phone industry also affected Qorvo's further shipments to downstream.

Unlike the weakness of the cell phone market, IoT and automotive have emerged as areas with long-term growth potential. In particular, automotive, China, Europe and the United States have clarified the direction of electrification and intelligent transformation of the automotive industry.

To keep up with the changing situation, Qorvo talks more about its product portfolio and technology strength in the automotive market in the public market. "Qorvo used to be a company that didn't have that much to do with automobiles until there were some changes in the automotive industry and we started to intersect with automobiles." Qorvo's entry into that market coincided with the point where automotive semiconductors were moving toward mass adoption, said Jing Huang, senior sales director for Qorvo's High Performance Products Division.

In the automotive market, Qorvo occupies a place with its technology accumulation in communication connectivity and power supply products. Over the past three years, Qorvo has launched a series of acquisitions to strengthen its portfolio and technology: in 2020, it acquired power management semiconductor company Active-Semi; in February of the same year, it completed the acquisition of Decawave, a UWB (ultra-wideband) manufacturer, and Custom MMIC, a manufacturer of RF and microwave devices; in May 2021, it completed the acquisition of MEMS sensor With a series of acquisitions, Qorvo has product and technology capabilities in UWB, matter (a new IoT protocol), SiC devices and MEMS to provide comprehensive solutions.

UWB is one of the potential technologies that can be used on a large scale in the automotive market. This technology can provide high-precision positioning and has been used by Apple and OPPO for cell phones and IoT, but has not yet developed a "killer application" that is generally accepted by the consumer market. With the rapid development of automotive intelligence, some new UWB applications will be discovered by UWB.

According to Qorvo's marketing manager Kong Dezheng's vision, when the car becomes a "smart space" scenario, UWB's secure communication features can achieve distance measurement for the car and other functions to prevent car theft. In addition, UWB can enable biometric detection in the car, so that when living organisms such as children or pets are left in the car, the car can provide alarm alerts, etc.