Last year saw the RF GaAS market grow less than  1% with a drop in cellular revenues offsetting gains in other market areas.

SA forecasts that gigabit LTE and emerging 5G applications will drive GaAs device revenue past $9 billion in 2021.
“The RF GaAs device market is so dependent on cellular terminals that declining growth rates in smartphone sales has put the brakes on total revenue growth,” says Eric Higham, Director of the Advanced Semiconductor Applications (ASA) service, “the good news for the industry is that growing adoption of gigabit LTE networks and devices, coupled with emerging 5G opportunities will restart the GaAs growth engine.”

“We are seeing new platforms and major program upgrades starting to ramp toward production and these developments will maintain the growth of GaAs device revenue in the defense sector,” noted Asif Anwar, Director of the Advanced Defense Systems (ADS) service.