Ten major development forecasts for the sensor industry in 2020

Good news, you who have struggled for a year in 2019 will have another year of struggle in 2020. In order to help you grow rapidly in the IoT industry and realize your personal and corporate value as soon as possible, here is a sensor development guide for 2020, I hope you will benefit from it.

Smart sensors and MEMS sensors have become the focus of enterprise development

While structural sensors and solid sensors can no longer meet the high demands for data collection and processing in the digital age, smart sensors and MEMS sensors have been very popular in recent years, and are gradually maturing in the direction of miniaturization, intelligence, multi-functions and networking. In particular, at the end of 2019, Shanghai started to build an intelligent sensor industry base, focusing on the development of MEMS technology, covering a variety of sensors such as force, light, sound, heat, magnetism, and environment. This also indicates that China will make efforts in the field of smart sensors and MEMS sensors in the future.

The integrated development of sensors and integrated circuits will become an important trend in my country's sensor manufacturing

Sensors belong to a sub-field of integrated circuits, but there are great differences. There is a large demand for flexible customization of sensors, and the R&D cycle is long. The materials and processes are more complex, and the large-scale production capacity is weak.

In the future, we will move closer to integrated circuits through design tools, model expression, testability settings, and process integration. We can utilize the integrated fusion of MEMS and integrated circuit Ansys and Candence customized simulation platforms. At the same time, we will establish IP models for sensor production and manufacturing to achieve large-scale mass production. We will then use quality testing methods to achieve the mechanism transformation of digital and analog. By utilizing these development models that suit China's national conditions, we will achieve rapid upgrades from sensor design to manufacturing.

Enterprise segmentation and verticalization, unicorns and hidden champions gradually emerge

Domestic sensor companies are mainly small and medium-sized, with limited R&D expenditures and innovation capabilities, and the policy support they receive is not strong. Many companies are deeply engaged in vertical fields. In addition, due to the current large scale of the domestic Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 market and fragmented demand, these vertical companies may be conservative about their business expansion and continue to develop their original businesses before the market is orderly.

In the context of "you can't eat a big fat man in one bite", we will see more hidden champions growing and developing in their original business areas in 2020, as well as unicorns emerging in an innovative environment.

The domestic production rate of sensors will steadily increase

Sensors, as one of the bottleneck technologies that affect the rapid development of industries such as the Internet of Things and Industry 4.0 in China, have always relied on foreign products. In recent years, policies and capital have been paying attention to the development of sensors. At the same time, a number of high-quality domestic sensor companies such as Senba Sensor and Wanxun Automation have emerged. With a complete industrial system from R&D, design, production to application, the domestic production rate of sensors will steadily advance. According to statistics, during the period of 2016-2020, the compound growth rate of the global sensor market was only 11%, while the average compound growth rate of my country's sensor industry reached 30%, which also sent a high-profile signal to the world.

Domestic industrial cluster pattern is obvious

As early as 2017, my country's sensor industry has initially formed five major industrial clusters in the Yangtze River Delta, Pearl River Delta, Northeast China, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei and Central China. According to statistics, listed sensor companies in the Yangtze River Delta account for 38%, and companies in the Pearl River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin-Hebei, Northeast China and Central China account for a similar proportion.

The "Three-Year Action Guide for the Smart Sensor Industry (2017-2019)" issued by the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology requires that "concentrate efforts on building an industrial cluster in the Yangtze River Delta with Shanghai and Jiangsu as the focus". At the same time, as of January 2020, the Yangtze River Delta region has gathered more than 50% of smart sensor companies. Under this environment, the center of domestic smart sensors will undoubtedly be located in the Yangtze River Delta, and other industrial clusters will most likely deepen their development based on other sub-sectors of sensors.

CMOS image sensor competition will enter the final stage

Due to the rapid development of IoT applications such as in-vehicle applications, machine vision, face recognition and security monitoring, as well as the popularity of multi-cameras in smartphones, CMOS image sensors entered a stage of rapid market expansion in 2019. As the leader of CMOS image sensors, Sony, which occupies more than 50% of the market share, proactively admitted that its own production capacity is insufficient.

In the case of Sony's insufficient production capacity, whether the other two giants of CMOS image sensors, Samsung and OmniVision Technologies, can seize part of the market share before Sony expands its factory and eventually form a three-way competition will be the most exciting drama in 2020.

Optical sensors will become an important innovation driver, and the technology market situation is obvious

From consumption, industry to automobiles, all contain elements of the Internet of Things. Thanks to downstream application markets such as the Internet of Things and robots, the optical sensor market is also growing rapidly. According to data released by GlobalMarketInsights at the end of 2019, by 2026, sales of optical sensors in the field of Industry 4.0 alone will reach US$36 billion, not to mention smart cities, smart agriculture and other fields that use sensors in large quantities.

However, it should be pointed out that the three current mainstream technologies of optical sensors, structured light, active stereo vision and ToF, have their own advantages and disadvantages in terms of cost and technology. As the Internet of Things develops steadily in 2020, the market for these three technologies has gradually stabilized.

Sensor customization solutions are deeper and wider

Sensors have their own customization features due to their functions and application scenarios. Traditional standard sensors can no longer meet the design requirements of OEMs, nor can they meet the preferences of end users. In 2019, we have seen some smartphone manufacturers cooperate with sensor companies such as Sony and Samsung to customize sensors.

As the application scenarios of the Internet of Things gradually expand in breadth and depth, more functions and design details will emerge. Companies with customized sensor solutions and flexible production capabilities will gain favor from OEM manufacturers in the future.

Multi-sensor fusion technology is gradually gaining popularity

As is well known, multi-sensor fusion technology is currently mainly used in the fields of autonomous driving and robotics. Even though Musk angrily criticized LiDAR in 2019 for being expensive and useless, he still cannot escape the combination of ultrasonic sensors , cameras and millimeter-wave radars. The safety of autonomous driving requires redundant support of sensors and the coordination of multiple sensors to improve fault tolerance. It can be foreseen that in the future, multi-sensor fusion of autonomous driving will become the mainstream of the market. It is further boldly predicted that multi-sensor fusion technology will be further applied and developed in the fields of wearable devices, health testing, smart homes, etc.

International mergers and acquisitions are increasing

As an old industry, sensors have always been at the bottom of the development of major industries. As the saying goes, insiders know the doorway, precisely because sensors are the most basic industry, its industrial resources are quite rich. Acquisitions and mergers of billions of dollars are no joke. TE acquired MEAS for $1.7 billion in 2014, AMS acquired Osram for 4.6 billion euros in 2019, and Sony acquired Toshiba's image sensor department for 155 million euros. These large-scale acquisition cases all show that large companies have maintained their high market share in the digital age.

In 2020, the vigorous development of China's sensor industry will inevitably have a certain impact on the global sensor companies' market. At the same time, with the massive application of IoT sensors , no company has been able to become the dominant player in a certain field. In order to consolidate their own market share, reduce the development space of competitors, and enter more new fields, international mergers and acquisitions will continue to increase.