STMicro and Texas Instruments battle for top spot
The MEMS market saw a solid 17% growth in 2011, to reach $10.2 billion, according to Yole Développement's latest annual ranking of the Top 30 MEMS companies. STMicroelectronics capitalised on the exploding demand for motion processing in mobile phones and made a 42% jump in MEMS sales, to push past $900 million in revenues, edging up neck and neck with established sector leader Texas Instruments. Texas Instruments' (TI) more mature micromirror MEMS business saw more modest, single-digit growth, but also passed the $900 million mark.
Coming in 4th place, Bosch is a very strong MEMS company with solid growth in 2011 in both automotive and consumer electronics. Bosch and STMicroelectronics (ST) are now the main manufacturers of accelerometers in the consumer electronic fields.
Smart phone demand drove over a whopping 39% growth across a whole range of sensor suppliers.
Knowles Electronics moved up to fourth place on 40% growth in MEMS microphones to $362 million. Magnetometer supplier AKM jumped 46%, to $279 million and eighth place. Though most magnetometers are not a purely MEMS technology, they are now so closely integrated with accelerometers that Yole now tracks them with the MEMS industry.
Fabless InvenSense jumped 67% to $144 million, thanks to its gyroscope and motion sensing offerings made at TSMC, and pulled off the MEMS industry's first major IPO. MEMSIC reported better than 80% growth on the strength of its magnetometer and accelerometer sales, to enter the Top 30 at $55 million.
Despite its wide diversity of players and products, MEMS still remains a very concentrated industry. The four leading IDMs - TI, ST, Hewlett Packard and Robert Bosch-- together sell some $3.3 billion worth of MEMS devices, accounting for around a third of all MEMS sales worldwide. These Top 30 companies account for almost 80% of total MEMS packaged device sales worldwide.
This burgeoning demand for motion sensing, location sensing, and better acoustic sensing in hand held devices will continue to drive rapid growth in MEMS. But it will also change the traditional structure of the industry, as those players and markets outpace the once dominant inkjet and micromirror components.
These high volume consumer markets will reward those players who best deliver not only low cost and reliable high volume production, but also fast time to market and ease-of-use. The coming solutions to reduce costs and improve performance by integrating multiple sensors and providing more sophisticated software to transform the sensor data into easy-to-use functions will drive suppliers from separate components to combination sensors and modules and software that simplify the systems integration work.
"Growth is now coming from combos of accelerometers and magnetometers and from combos of accelerometers and gyros, which started to ship in volume last year" says Laurent Robin, Activity Leader, Inertial MEMS Devices & Technologies. "Companies who make only accelerometers will have to change."
For companies that do not release their MEMS results, Yole estimates sales based on the number of devices sold in the companies' product markets, the companies' market share, and the device price based on published prices or reverse engineering studies.
