LYON, FRANCE – Use of MEMS (micro electromechanical structures) components will grow 24% through 2016, a leading research firm said today.

MEMS sales will reach $19.6 billion on 15.8 billion units shipped, up from $8.7 billion on 4.3 billion units, says Yole Développement. Inertial MEMS will strongly contribute to the market growth, and new devices will contribute as well (microbolometers, oscillators, microfluidics).

The firm’s new report describes examples that illustrate a supply chain evolution: the emergence of inertial combo sensors in consumer: Combo sensors should represent a large part of the market in 2016. For select applications (gaming, cellphones, tablets, PMP), it will be close to 1/3 of the shipments and close to 50% of the value; the supply chain of the MEMS microphone industry has changed in the past few years; 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% CAGR over the 2010-2016 period in dollar value and 24% in units. The consumer market is still the main driver, accounting for about 46% of the total market in value,” says Dr. Eric Mounier, Yole Développement.

Some 21 MEMS suppliers had sales above $100 million in 2010. In the coming years, players involved in high-value and automotive markets will likely keep internal fabs, says Yole, while existing players that focus on consumer markets could easily outsource production, and consumer players with internal fabs will have to drastically increase market shares to survive and support 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, the firm said.

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