ABI: Texas Instruments ranked top vendor in Mobile Internet Device Platform Vendor Matrix

ABI Research (News - Alert) has released its latest evaluation of the global Mobile Internet Device (MID) platform vendors. According to ABI’s Vendor Matrix, Texas Instruments (TXN) is the top vendor while Qualcomm (QCOM) and Intel (News - Alert) Corporation (INTC) have claimed the second and third spots respectively.

ABI officials said it was an analytical tool developed by the company to study and estimate vendors' positions in specific markets. Vendors are assessed on the important parameters of "innovation" and "implementation" across several industry-specific criteria, they added.

Different features are looked to evaluate the “innovation", criteria for this matrix, ABI analysts said. For example, the firm examined how quickly the vendor was able to bring their product to market. Vendors who had a faster turnaround period for market entry received a higher ranking.

Other factors studied while determining the “innovation” parameter include the flexibility of the vendors’ solutions or designs. ABI analysts said that a more flexible solution allows for substitution of most parts of the design with similar parts.

The matrix also takes into consideration whether the platform solution includes connectivity solutions by bundling of WWAN (wireless Wide Area Networking), WPAN (wireless personal area network) and/or GPS and also if the platform is based on an x86 processor or Cortex A-8 or higher. According to ABI officials, ARM11 and lower processors are not as competitive in terms of performance.

Providing information on how vendors were judged under the "implementation," parameter, ABI Research said the vendors' announced design wins combined with the significance of each win was an important criterion. Higher profile design wins carried more weight since they will usually lead to more shipments, company officials said.

Another important criterion was the vendors’ experience with CE and mobile device vendors, which reflected their existing relationships with consumer electronics and mobile device vendors. This in turn translated into design wins for UMDs with these types of companies.  ABI analysts said the matrix similarly evaluates the vendors’ experience with PC vendors.

Among other features used to form the matrix is the platform vendor's ability to support all full PC OS, which would be dictated by the capability to produce an x86-based platform. ABI analysts that the platform vendor's ability to support all lower level OS would be dictated by the capability to produce an ARM (News - Alert)-based platform.

According to ABI Research, the MID Platform Vendor Matrix is part of a group of vendor matrices for UMDs — one for UMPCs (ultra-mobile personal computing), one for netbooks, and one for MIDs. The same criteria for platform vendors and the same scores for those criteria are used for all three, but the weighting of the criteria will be different for each type of UMD.

Officials of ABI Research added that they will continually evaluate the weighting of criteria as each of them changes in importance and will add new criteria when necessary.

Philip Solis, principal analyst at ABI Research noted, "Certain MID vendors can work with ARM directly if they are used to creating complete designs for their products. Among semiconductor vendors providing a processor and platform for MIDs, TI and Qualcomm (News - Alert) have very different strengths that would be of varying interest depending on whether the MID vendor is typically a handset, PC, or consumer electronics vendor."

This Vendor Matrix forms part of ABI Research's MIDs and Mobile CE Research Service.