Probably the biggest driver of semiconductor (and hence EDA indirectly) at present are cellphones, especially smartphones. There are more memories shipped in phones (and tablets) than mainline PCs. The unit volumes are amazing (approaching two billion phones a year in a world of seven billion people).

Nielsen just announced the results of their recent survey of recent buyers of smartphones. Of people who had purchased a smartphone in the previous 3 months (roughly Q4) 44.5% chose an iPhone (up from 25.1% in October, roughly Q3). But Android retained the lead with a 46.9% share, down from 61.6% in October. How many phones are we talking about? Apple is expected to announce in its earnings call that it sold over 30M iPhones last quarter. So that puts the smartphone market at perhaps 250M units for 2011.

To be honest, I think these numbers are a lot less significant than they sound. The latest iPhone, the 4S, went on sale on October 14th. Everyone knew it was coming and so most people who wanted a new iPhone waited until then. So Q3 numbers for Apple were temporarily depressed and Q4 numbers were temporarily boosted. If we guess that half the difference is this one-off kick (and I have no idea if it is) then iPhone is really 35% and Android is really perhaps 60% leaving everyone else with crumbs (Blackberry, Nokia+WP7).

As long as Apple continues to post numbers in this sort of range, and doesn't retreat to, say, 20% market share then it wins. It has enough of a base that people will want to write apps for it (you make more money on an iPhone app than an Android app) and Apple will take almost all the profit out of the smart phone hardware market (or even the whole cell-phone hardware market since the non-smart-phones (stupid-phones?) don't make much profit especially at the low-end).

Of course for EDA, Android is probably more beneficial than iPhone. Apple is one company and designs a couple of SoCs per year. The Android ecosystem consists of lots of companies. Of course there are many more chips in iPhone than just A5 (Qualcomm supplies the baseband and some other chips and are Apple's largest semiconductor supplier, for example).