(iTers News) - Worldwide revenues for communications processors, or baseband chips   grew 8.8% from a year ago to reach US$1.8 billion in 2013, according to market research firm International Data Corporation (IDC).

"The communications processor market is on a steady growth path," said Abhi Dugar, research manager, semiconductor at IDC.

"The emergence of open standards is causing disruption in the traditional OEM, ODM, semiconductors, and embedded software value chain, creating new opportunities for merchant silicon vendors to displace ASIC-based proprietary solutions, added he.

A new breed of multicore communications processors, SOCs, and standalone MPUs implemented in 28nm process technology and below are starting to hit the market now, which are enabling better network visibility, manageability, and scalability in support of software-defined networking (SDN) and network functions virtualization (NFV) adoption by cloud service providers, web service providers, and telecom network operators, according to him.

This is a secular multi-year trend that IDC believes will continue to drive the communications processor market forward over the next five years.

Freescale leads growth trajectory 

In 2013, Freescale held the leading market position with 37.7% of the overall worldwide communications processor revenue share with its Power Architecture and ARM-based SOCs.

Intel ranked as second taking up a 25.2% market share with its x86 standalone MPUs

With a 44.5% year-over-year increase in its revenues in 2013, Cavium's MIPS architecture-based SOCs placed third in market share at 13.3% in 2013.

Avago/LSI and Broadcom earned the fourth and fifth market share positions respectively.