Radar technologies: consumer, the latest field for market expansion

“Consumer is the newest market segment in the radar industry,” comments Cédric Malaquin, Technology & Market Analyst, RF electronics at Yole Développement (Yole).“Market opportunities are huge. They will be driven by consumer adoption of in-air motion sensing devices. So far, a single end system player, Google, is pushing radar-based in-air motion sensing. Google is highly motivated to face competition from Apple and Amazon.”

With this single player, Yole, the market research & strategy consulting company, is expecting the market to grow to US$250 million by 2025, with +56% CAGR between 2019 and 2025. Yole’s analysts do not expect significant shipments for drones and few for presence detection. For the motion sensing case, however, they anticipate adoption through the home assistant market.

Therefore, in-air gesture sensing is a key technology for consumer devices, especially in the smart home era. However, fierce competition exists in this market, where we can see other sensing principles, mostly camera based, as well as other interaction methods, for instance voice recognition based, explains Cédric Malaquin from Yole.
Radar comes as an alternative technology, enabling privacy and with low power consumption. Google and other radar-based gesture sensing protagonists will push the privacy advantage to differentiate in this competitive market. Indeed, the radar processing is performed at the edge and not in the cloud. Consumer adoption will be the key point, with a choice between consumer privacy concerns and exposure to another radiating device, states Yole. More info.