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After a year of financial and market struggles, Advanced Micro Devices (AMD) has fallen off iSuppli's latest listing of the world's top 10 chip manufacturers.

The acquisition of ATI helped AMD to enter the chip top 10 last year for the very first time. Ranked at 8, the company saw its revenues grow by 91.6 percent from USD 3.9 billion in 2005 to USD 7.5 billion in 2006. iSuppli, however, believes that the company’s 2007 sales will take a significant hit, by 22.8 percent to USD 5.8 billion. The market research firm sees this decline to be dramatic enough to kick AMD out of the top 10 list and list it at 11 in its preliminary ranking.

Intel, on the other hand, continues to dominate the semiconductor industry, according to iSuppli's numbers. The firm's latest report shows that Intel's chip revenue is expected to rise 7.7 percent in 2007 to hit USD 33.97 billion in 2007. That's up from USD 31.5 billion in 2006.

"Throughout most of the year, Intel successfully defended much of the market share that it won from AMD in the first quarter in the PC microprocessor segment due to the success of its lines of dual- and quad-core chips," said iSuppli's Dale Ford.

Texas Instruments (TI), besides AMD, is the only top 10 manufacturer to see a revenue decline, according to the market research firm’s estimates. iSuppli said that that TI derives more than 45 percent of its revenue from wireless communications chips, and may suffer a 3.4 percent decline in global semiconductor revenue in 2007.

iSuppli believes that the negative growth is mainly due to Nokia’s decision to diversify its chip supplier base. “Nokia, the world’s largest seller of mobile phones, historically has used Texas Instruments as its near-exclusive supplier of wireless baseband suppliers. However, the company has engaged in a strategic initiative to add other baseband suppliers to reduce its dependency on Texas Instruments. This has benefited other companies such as Infineon, but has cut into Texas Instruments’ sales,” Ford said.

According to the survey, Samsung Electronics will remain the world's second-biggest chipmaker with 7.4 percent of the market while Toshiba will rise to third place.

The real bright spot on iSuppli's list, though, is Sony Corp. The company's semiconductor revenue is expected to rise by 56.8 percent in 2007, which is, by far, the highest percentage growth of any of the top 20 semiconductor suppliers for the year.

Infineon was expected to benefit from a booming market in mobile phones to rise to 10th place from 15th, thanks to its own strengthening wireless business.