The boom in digital video on smartphones such as the iPhone is creating huge demand for the video compression chips supplied by firms such as Qualcomm and Samsung.
And it is not just mobile video, digital TV and PC-based multimedia systems is generating a large appetite for MPEG compression ICs and the big suppliers in this 
market are Broadcom, MediaTek, NXP and STMicroelectronics.
According to market watcher In-Stat, shipments of MPEG ICs, which support compression and decompression of digital video, will reach two billion units by 2013.
A technology trends in the video compression market is that H.264 compression technology has superseded MPEG-2 in many line-powered applications.
On top of this there is enhancement technology such as Scalable Video Codec (SVC) which will be in next generation H.264 silicon.
According to Michelle Abraham, In-Stat analyst. "H.264 compression is finding a home in most new MPEG ICs targeting both line-powered and mobile devices."
According to In-Stat, Qualcomm was the leader in the mobile MPEG codec IC market for mobile handsets, while Zoran leads among "Other Mobile Applications," followed by Samsung.