You only have to open up a smartphone and count the individual chips to see the vast potential for silicon vendors. Each component represents an area of competition, and now with the looming emergence of wearables, those component manufacturers will find even more opportunities for their chips to end up inside a smartwatch, wristband or head-mounted unit – as well as the plethora of Internet of Things (IoT) related applications that might require technology born of smartphones and industrial devices. Teardowns of the new Apple Watch serve well to illustrate this point. The high-end or luxury wearable (costing between $400 and $18,000), is packed with silicon – needed to provide the motion sensitive and health tracking functionality of the wrist-mounted…