Market and Technology Trends

Status of the MEMS Industry 2022

By Yole Intelligence — Aug 2022

An almost $22B MEMS market will materialize in five years, owing to emerging applications and combined intelligence that provide more added-value in MEMS sensors

Key features

Market projection for all MEMS devices (sensors & actuators) in Munits, through 2027
Market projection for all MEMS devices (sensors & actuators) in $M, through 2027
MEMS ecosystem describing IDMs, foundries, and fabless players (player mapping, player revenue & market share per device, etc.)
Investments, fundings, M&As, partnerships, etc.
Supply chain status
Device market/application trends
Device technology trends

What's new

Updates include, but are not limited to:

Market data and forecasts in $ and units for the period 2018 - 2027.
Analysis of more than 15 different devices, including inertial, microphones, pressure, and others, in six different markets including consumer, automotive, industrial, medical, telecom, and defense & aerospace, including market and application trends.
Calendar-year 2021 estimates for sensor manufacturers’ revenues and market share, along with MEMS foundry analysis and the associated ecosystem development (including funding/investments, M&As, and partnerships), including a special focus as well on supply chain status.

Technology trends at device level and system level, with a special focus on intelligence at the edge.

Product objectives

This report is an update of Yole’s best-selling Status of the MEMS Industry report, which was first released in 2004. This latest edition includes updates on volumes/ASP/market sizes for calendar-year 2021, providing an overview of the best future growth opportunities for MEMS and the market’s key drivers. Furthermore, this report explores the ecosystem’s development product-wise and funding-wise, as well as the main stakeholders involved. This report was finalized at the end of June 2022 – therefore, the data it presents is the best available data to-date. This report summarizes the status of the MEMS industry 2022 in a thorough manner, taking into account the trends for each market/device/application separately.

Emerging application trends in MEMS

MEMS sensors and actuators are part of everyday life and found in a variety of systems, from smartphones to cars to fighter jets. MEMS are going through an unprecedented growth period, reaching $13.5B in 2021 (up from $11.5B in 2020), effectively growing by +17% YoY_20-21 after a +10% YoY_19-20growth. The market is expected to cross the $22B mark five years from now, growing annually at a ~9% CAGR_21-27.

The main growth is coming from traditional MEMS devices (microphones, RF, inertial, optical) found across a multitude of applications such as wearables & hearables (especially sensor-packed TWS), 5G smartphones, ADAS, industrial monitoring, and many others. Nevertheless, there is great promise for future growth from emerging devices (small market now) such as gas sensors for air-quality monitoring and ultrasonic MEMS for haptics and medical imaging, with the big hype being around MEMS timing/oscillators and microspeakers. Both have the potential to replace decades-old technologies, and they are on the right track to do so.

$$$ funneled now for the promise of future growth

In order to support future growth, financial movements and developments related to a diverse set of MEMS are not lacking. Numerous fundraisings at various stages across a multitude of targeted devices and applications have been seen, raising a total of more than $700M: OQmented for optical MEMS, Vesper for piezo mics, xMEMS, Usound, and SonicEdge for MEMS microspeakers… New technologies and devices still attract buyers, and the number of M&As is still increasing: Arioso acquired by Bosch, Sensonor by Safran, Resonant by Murata... Also, collaborations helping companies address new promising markets: TriLite with Dispelix, LaSAR Alliance, AudioPixels with Earth Mountain, etc…

Finally, as a force to be reckoned with, Chinese MEMS players have grown rapidly these last years, with multiple IPOs (Goermicro - IPO to be finalized, MEMSensing, Novosense…) and fundraisings (Sappland, EpicMEMS, MEMSonics, Hypernano, Beijing Zhixin Tech, ZITN, GWIC…) The big focus area for Chinese companies is RF (BAW devices), which is much needed for the domestic 5G future. By attracting as many customers as possible and improving their sensors’ performance, China’s growing presence seems inevitable in the MEMS market’s future.

MEMS and brains, a fruitful combination

MEMS sensor makers are trying to get out of the product commoditization cycle and move up the value chain by adding software, processing, and computing capabilities to MEMS sensors, giving them extra functionalities and added-value. There is clearly a path being formed by the main MEMS manufacturers, with approaches including pre-processing and sensor fusion (TDK Invensense, Bosch, STMicroelectronics, Melexis, etc.) and AI/ML/DL at/on/in the edge (Bosch, STMicroelectronics, Aspinity w/ Infineon, Syntiant w/ Infineon, etc.). Associated products include STMicroelectronics’ ISPU, Bosch’s BHI260AP and BME688, etc…

The persistent shift in some applications away from legacy (“dumb”) sensors to the next generation – more intelligent sensors – is bringing the lost value back to the sensor manufacturer by enabling the future applications of the end-customer and the enhanced UX for the end-user, which is inevitably related to data insights and analytics derived from the sensor data!

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Status of the MEMS Industry 2022

An almost $22B MEMS market will materialize in five years, owing to emerging applications and combined intelligence that provide more added-value in MEMS sensors

Emerging application trends in MEMS

$$$ funneled now for the promise of future growth

MEMS and brains, a fruitful combination