Future development trend and direction of sensor industry

Future development trend and direction of sensor industry

With the continuous development of Internet of Things information and integrated circuits, sensors have become an important pillar of modern information industry. Under the universal attention and investment in the world, the global sensor market has shown a rapid growth trend in the constant change and innovation.

CMOS competition is heating up

Major suppliers of CMOS sensors include Japan's Sony, South Korea's Samsung Electronics and Howe Technology, which was acquired by Chinese manufacturers.

Sales of image sensors fell 6.9 percent from a year earlier to 186.5 billion yen in the last quarter as demand for mobile devices fell. Sony cut its sales target for image sensors to 700 billion yen from 740 billion yen in April 2018 to March 2019, a 7.8 percent increase from 649.4 billion yen in the previous year.

SONY earlier said it would allocate 40% of its new Japanese engineers over the next two years to chip businesses such as image sensors. SONY is looking to new applications such as cars and mobile phones for growth.

The distribution is in line with SONY's plans. SONY previously said it planned to invest 600 billion yen ($5.4 billion) in its graphics sensor business in the three years to March 2021, accounting for half of its planned capital expenditure. SONY controls more than half of the smartphone image sensor market, which has been a key growth driver during the company's transition.

Samsung, for its part, has also been aggressively attacking SONY in the CMOS image sensor market in recent years. However, according to foreign media analysis data, Samsung may change in the middle of 2019, will increase the image sensor production capacity, to regain some market share from SONY. The capacity of image sensors will increase from 45,000 to more than 120,000 per day to meet the needs of our partners. To this end, Samsung has also converted some RAM production lines to CMOS production lines.

SONY is the dominant supplier in the image sensor market, producing 100,000 units per month. Its market share is already 46%, while Samsung's share is only 19%. Therefore, Samsung is also planning to enter the field of automobile sensors. Howe Technology is the world's third image sensor supplier after SONY and Samsung. In the field of security image sensors, their share in 2014 and 2015 was up to 32% and 49%, respectively. They are also active in the automotive, medical applications, entertainment applications, Internet of things and other markets.

In addition, there are a number of domestic manufacturers such as Geke micro and Siwei in this market, the CMOS image sensor market is unprecedented lively.

Favorable policies to promote the rapid development of the industry: a number of strategic and guiding policy documents have promoted the development of our sensor and Internet of Things industry towards the direction of integration, innovation, ecology and cluster.

The rapid development of downstream applications drives the demand for sensors: the range of sensor applications covers industry, automotive electronics, consumer electronics, Internet of things and other fields. The booming development of downstream applications will improve the demand for information perception and drive the increase of the demand for sensors.

With the development of sensors in the direction of "four modernizations", overtaking in corners is expected to be realized: the sensor system is developing towards the direction of miniaturization, intelligence, multi-function and networking, and Chinese enterprises still have the opportunity of overtaking in corners.

Development of industry clustering: Sensor enterprises in our country are trying hard to pursue foreign enterprises and a regional cluster of sensor enterprise has emerged. At present, sensor manufacturers are mainly concentrated in the Yangtze River Delta region, and gradually formed the regional spatial layout mainly in Beijing, Shanghai, Nanjing, Shenzhen, Shenyang, Xi 'an and other central cities. Among them, nearly half of the major sensor enterprises are distributed in the Yangtze River Delta region, followed by the Pearl River Delta, Beijing-Tianjin region, central region and Northeast region.

Among them, the Yangtze River Delta region has gradually formed a relatively complete sensor production system and industrial supporting facilities, including thermal, magnetic, image, weighing, photoelectric, temperature, gas and other sensors. The Pearl River Delta region has formed the thermal, magnetic, weighing, ultrasonic sensor industry system. Northeast region mainly produces MEMS force sensor, gas sensor, humidity sensor; The Beijing-Tianjin region and the central region develop in the mode of close combination of industry, university and research, mainly focusing on the research and development of new sensors

In today's society, a variety of emerging science and technology radiate widely. With the advent of the intelligent age, sensors, as the "eyes and ears" of modern science, become the basis for people to quickly obtain, analyze and use effective information. Sensors will become increasingly irreplaceable.

In the future, under the background of continuous improvement of economic environment, the demand of sensor market will continue to increase, and sensors will be more and more applied to various fields of social construction and life. According to the forecast of the high-tech Industry Research Institute, the global sensor market will maintain a growth rate of more than 20% in the next few years.

Since 2014, the state has issued a series of strategic and guiding documents, which have effectively promoted the rapid development of our sensor and Internet of things industry towards the direction of innovation, integration, clustering and intelligence. Intelligent sensor has certain communication function, and has the ability of collecting, processing and exchanging information. It can realize high-precision information collection through software technology.

There is no doubt that intelligent sensor has advantages over ordinary sensors. Therefore, intelligent sensor is a development trend. At present, Chongqing has a good foundation for development in the field of smart sensors, and smart sensor enterprises represented by Chuanyi and China Mobile Internet of Things have a high popularity in China.

The development of the Internet of Things has changed people's way of life and is inseparable from the existence of sensor devices. Sensors will also develop towards the direction of mobility, miniaturization, integration and diversification.