Top 30 MEMS ranking: ST challenges TI for top spot

LYON, FRANCE: The MEMS market saw strong 17 percent growth in 2011, to reach $10.2 billion, according to Yole Développement’s latest market analysis. STMicroelectronics capitalized on the exploding demand for motion processing in mobile phones for a 42 percent jump in MEMS sales, to push past $900 million in revenues, edging up neck in neck with traditional sector leader Texas Instruments in Yole Développement’s annual ranking of the Top 30 MEMS companies.

Texas Instruments’ (TI) more mature micromirror MEMS business saw more modest, single-digit growth, but also passed the $900 million mark. Bosch is a very strong 4th top MEMS company with strong growth in 2011 in both automotive and consumer electronics. Bosch and STMicroelectronics are now the main manufacturers of accelerometers in the consumer electronic fields.Source: Yole Développement, France.

Smart phone demand drove whopping 40 percent or better growth across a whole range of sensor suppliers. Knowles Electronics moved up to fourth rank on 40 percent growth in MEMS microphones to $362 million. Magnetometer supplier AKM jumped 46 percent, 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 percent 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 percent growth on the strength of its magnetometer and accelerometer sales, to enter the Top 30 ranks 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 percent 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.”