Year-in-Review: Smart NICs Jump in 2023
Author: Bryon Moyer
Communications processors in 2023 bore a resemblance to a swimming duck. Smartphones, the visible upper body, moved along at a typically unhurried stately pace. Underwater, however, the infrastructure saw much more action as companies paddled hard to enable more data to move more quickly.
Communications is a broad category, including smartphone processors, application-specific standard products to power networking equipment, wireless infrastructure and terminals, and even optical technology. It touches many end markets, from consumers to industrial to data centers to military. Of those, technologies speeding access to data centers and improvements in internet of things (IoT) wireless chipsets brought the most change.
Data centers saw increasing adoption of smart network-interface cards (NICs) and new switch configurations, while improvements in optical transport inched further into the server rack—if not through new production solutions, at least through proofs of concept building on new optical devices. At the extreme opposite end of the network, wireless chips integrated more baseband processing capability and security. Smartphones, by contrast, had a mostly unremarkable year—with one exception.
That smartphone exception relates to the state of the smartphone market, which has seen unit sales slump and inventory accumulate—a situation that has impacted development decisions. TechInsights forecasts that 2026 smartphone unit shipments will finally recover to the level they saw in 2021; the compound annual growth rate (CAGR) over that period is effectively zero.
Infrastructure processors, however, are seeing growth, although most of that growth is steady, as Figure 1 shows. Included on that chart are smart NIC sales with compound annual growth projected at over 25%, reflecting smart-NIC adoption, with an over 50% annual growth in 100-gigabit Ethernet (GbE) models leading the charge. TechInsights forecasts that newer 400 GbE units, due to appear in 2024, will grow over 100% annually for the first couple years.
