Industrial chip market to grow to USD 61 billion in 2021

Compared with a total semiconductor market of around USD 340 billion, the industrial sector is estimated to have accounted for about twelve percent of the overall semiconductor TAM in 2015, a larger proportion than the automotive sector. Cumulative industrial semiconductor demand from 2015 to 2021 is projected to total over USD 350 billion, reinforcing the conclusion that opportunities in the industrial sector should not be overlooked by semiconductor suppliers. The industrial sector includes many obscure, somewhat dull product categories, such as pressure measurement, proximity sensors and motion detectors, which offer none of the glamor and allure of smart phones, smart watches or wearables, but which nonetheless are manufactured in volumes of tens of millions of units per year and offer a stable and dependable revenue stream. The Internet of Things (IoT) has been the key focus area for the semiconductor industry for the last five years and it is Semicast’s view that Industrial IoT can be broadly described as intelligence and connectivity being added to ever smaller, distributed, remote industrial devices. Industrial IoT is not viewed by Semicast as a growth application for industrial semiconductors itself; instead this intelligence and connectivity is provided by the addition of sub-dollar 32-bit microcontrollers, together with short-range wireless communications ICs based on standards such as 6LoWPAN, Bluetooth/BLE, LoRa, NFC, Sub-1/2.4 GHz, Wi-Fi and ZigBee. Colin Barnden, Principal Analyst at Semicast Research and study author, commented “These intelligent connected devices generate the Little Data which has never previously been captured, to be processed locally or fed straight to the Cloud for Big Data analytics, thus creating the Industrial IoT of smart buildings, cities, factories, grid, medical, payment and security.” Leading vendor of semiconductors to the industrial sector in 2015

1. Texas Instruments
2. Infineon Technologies
3. Intel (following the acquisition of Altera)
4. STMicroelectronics
5. Renesas Electronics