AMD, Freescale seem to be losers revealed a research company, iSuppli Corp. in its 2007 projected rankings.

Advanced Micro Devices Inc. and Freescale Semiconductor Inc. are most likely to drop out of the top 10 with best 2007 sales.

Intel Corp.'s revenue is expected to rise 7.7 percent to reach $33.97 billion in 2007 making it likely to remain the largest IC maker for the year.

Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd., Toshiba Corp. and Texas Instruments Inc., are projected to be in second, third and fourth places respectively.

STMicroelectronics, Hynix, Renesas, Sony, NXP and Infineon will follow in that order of the top 10 IC sales leaders.

Sony Corp. and Infineon Technologies AG jumped into the top 10 from 14th and 15th positions respectively, in 2006.

The increase in Sony's revenue is attributed to its sales of chips for Play Station 3 video-game console.

However Sony announced a possible deal to transfer production of its Cell microprocessor for PlayStation 3 to Toshiba which will as well transfer its 2007 chip revenue to the firm if it's closed before the end of the year. This may lead to an increase and decrease in Toshiba and Sony ranking respectively.

Due to an increase in wireless communications semiconductor sales, Infineon is set to achieve 14.6 percent.

Qualcomm rise to the 12th rank in 2007 compared to 16th in 2006 is due to a surge in sales of semiconductors for mobile handsets and infrastructure.

Freescale semiconductor is set to decline by 10.7 percent in 2007 chip sales due to weaknesses in Motorola Inc. its major customer, since it lost the market share to Nokia and Samsung in 2007 mobile handset sales.

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 Dale Ford, vice president, market intelligence for iSuppli.

AMD's sales are expected to decline by 22.7 percent this year.

Electronics Intel Sony Qualcomm