In 2016, MEMS market will be $19.6 billion and 15.8 billion units, respectively

LYON, FRANCE: Yole Développement announced its report Status of the MEMS Industry. Totally revamped from previous years, this all new 2011 edition presents MEMS device markets, key player strategies, key industry changes and trends including foundries business evolution. It also includes MEMS equipment forecast and major MEMS manufacturing evolutions.

MEMS supply chain will evolve
Today, MEMS devices can be used as a replacement function (e.g. microphones), as a new function (e.g. micro-mirror, RF MEMS tunable antenna) or as a combination of functions (e.g. IMUs). This last function is bringing a Business Model revolution as new partnerships are becoming necessary. Indeed, structural changes of the MEMS industrial supply chain are occurring as further fragmentation of an activity is starting.Source: Yole Développement, France.

This is happening in the microphone business as some players are processing wafers while others are focusing on packaging and selling the sensor. Also, new intermediate business models appear between MEMS foundries and IDMs: some IDMs specialize in producing MEMS wafers with their own design but at the same time some MEMS foundries are developing product platforms with their own design as well.

Another complication of the industry comes from multi-chip integration in a module: it’s starting with inertial modules, from 6DOF to 10DOF and this implies many new challenges in integration, software and supply chain.

Yole Développment’s report describes examples that are illustrating that supply chain evolution, e.g.:
* The emergence of inertial combo sensors in consumer: Combo sensors should represent a large part of the market in 2016. For select key applications (Gaming, Cell phones, Tablets, P MP), it will be close to 1/3 of the shipments and close to 50 percent of the value.

* The supply chain of the MEMS microphone industry has changed in the past few years (Infineon has turned into a microphone die supplier and works with Asian MEMS microphone players: AAC Acoustics, Hosiden, BSE, Goertek… while some other companies are trying to become microphone manufacturers instead of being just foundry, like MEMSTech and Omron).

* For bolometers, camera cores (module with detector) are increasingly becoming a key business for camera manufacturers (FLIR and DRS propose new cores in 2011). This will further facilitate the infrared detector integration and the adoption by new camera players.

“The MEMS market will undergo a 15 percent CAGR over the 2010-2016 period in $ value and 24 percent in units. In 2010, we estimated the MEMS market to be $8.7 billion for 4.3 billion devices and the consumer market is still the main driver that accounts for about 46 percent of the total market in value,” announces Dr. Eric Mounier, Yole Développement.

In 2016, the MEMS market figures will be $19.6 billion and 15.8 billion units respectively. Inertial MEMS will strongly contribute to the market growth and new devices will contribute as well (microbolometers, oscillators, microfluidics). The MIS report also includes MEMS Front-End and Back-End equipment forecast.

Analysis of MEMS players’ strategic moves
The 2011 edition of MIS will cover all the structural changes the MEMS industry is undergoing. The MEMS business is maturing as it moving from a highly fragmented MEMS business to fewer larger suppliers with now 21 players above $100 million in sales in 2010.

The big players get bigger (e.g. Bosch, ST, Panasonic) as they are able to supply (ramping up when necessary), to drive costs down and to offer reliable devices. At the same time, it is becoming tough for smaller players to compete. Small and diversified MEMS players will have a hard time competing with big players, but there is still room for specialized companies.

“For example, AKM, Knowles, TI and Inkjet companies make a decent business with only one product. Because the business is maturing, others can specialize in one part of the supply chain: for e.g. Infineon specializes in making the MEMS microphone die / wafer only, others specialize in packaging or in software,” explains Laurent Robin, Yole Développement.

Today, most of the top 30 companies are integrated manufacturing companies and the new thing is that an increasing number of those big companies start to offer foundry services. The others are becoming fab-light, either by outsourcing consumer devices for cost and infrastructure reasons or by outsourcing specific parts of the process for inkjet heads for instance.

The top 30 MEMS ranking illustrates this change as only two fabless companies are among the ranking (Knowles and InvenSense) while many fab-light companies are present (e.g. HP, Freescale, AD, Lexmark, Infineon, VTI). There are also many other fabless companies struggling, or still in the growing phase and they could become large players soon or are just starting commercialization.

The new MIS report analyzes why the coming years will be critical for the MEMS industry. Yole Développement has identified the different scenarios: players involved in high-value and automotive markets will likely keep their internal fabs; existing players which move in consumer will have the possibility to easily outsource production; and consumer players with internal fabs will have to drastically increase their market shares to survive and support the infrastructure costs.

Foundries will need to get a critical size of wafer volume to be stable either by developing new device offers or by selling to additional customers. But MEMS foundries coming from the semiconductor area will only target high volume applications where the number of processes is limited.