This may not come as a surprise to anyone who owns an iPhone or tests set-top boxes, but wireless and consumer technologies are driving the growth of many of the largest chip vendors. According to the latest rankings released for the first half of the year by IC Insights, Intel keeps its top spot, but the most growth came from Qualcomm, which saw its sales increase by 29 percent over the same period in 2007.

Wireless chip vendors Broadcom and Infineon also saw their growth increase, while the No. 2 wireless chip maker, Texas Instruments, remained flat (it’s still ranked as the third largest vendor, though). Fellow blogger Vijay Nagarajan would likely point out that this is less of a wireless industry problem and probably has to do with TI’s non-existent 3G baseband chip catalog (it does do custom chips for 3G). Other than wireless, Nvidia, Samsung, and Panasonic all saw growth rates above 20 percent, indicating the strength of consumer devices.

chart from IC Insights