Status of the MEMS industry 2010

NEW YORK, USA: Reportlinker.com announced that a new market research report is available in its catalogue: Status of the MEMS Industry 2010

Market trends
The growth is back, but the industry infrastructure has changed: a limited number of companies are taking full benefit of the growth of the market. Industry is undergoing structural changes.

MEMS business was almost flat since 2007: this is good news compared to the semiconductor industry that has collapsed during that time, but as many companies have made production infrastructure investments from 2006 to 2008, 2009 has been really difficult for several MEMS manufacturers.

Growth is back, but the growth has changed: only a few companies have 8" production infrastructure in place and it provides them a very strong cost benefit, helping them to target lower price consumer electronics applications. STM, Bosch, InvenSense (as a fabless) are taking full advantage of these changes. Now the question is: what will be the reaction of their competitors.

In parallel to this industrial situation, MEMS foundries are exiting stronger from the crisis: more system manufacturers have decided to stop internal MEMS manufacturing, so in addition to the organic growth of the MEMS fabless companies these system companies are now working with MEMS foundries. As such, MEMS foundries are extremely active at the moment with new customers looking to outsource MEMS manufacturing.

This growth is attracting new players in MEMS foundry business, like TSMC, UMC, etc. In addition, the Si interposer business opportunities, wafer level packaging and the 3D chip stacking using through silicon vias (TSV) are also growth drivers for the MEMS foundries.

Innovation in MEMS is changing: brand new devices are now launched on the market and a complete family of totally new MEMS devices are under development. The digital compass, the IR and thermography cameras, the oscillator, etc., are driving these new generation of MEMS products.

In addition, most of the new applications are linked to new usage of existing devices (human machine interface, replacement of existing technologies). Strong efforts are put into the packaging adaptation in order to have a cost adapted structure (packaging is more than 40 percent of the cost of a MEMS device on average) and enter new applications (like mobile applications). New ways to package and integrate MEMS devices in a system are fueling the growth of MEMS industries.