The global smart sensor market is expected to witness high growth during the forecast period due to increasing demand in the automotive and consumer electronics industries. The factors such as growing concern towards security & surveillance, up surging consumer electronics sector, favourable government initiatives, growth in automotive industry, increasing need for energy-efficient appliances, and growing trend of miniaturization in the sensors segment are expected to boost the growth of market during the forecast period.
Smart sensors are defined as the combination of a sensor with signal conditioning, embedded algorithms and digital interface. Smart sensors are also termed as intelligent sensors and are basically used for digital processing of signals such as voice, audio, video, temperature, pressure, or position to provide decision making for an individual/machinery on the basis of mathematical manipulation. They offer various advantages such as high reliability, low power consumption, wireless configuration, high performance, easy maintenance, size flexibility and minimal requirement for interconnecting cables. Smart sensors also have capabilities of self-diagnosis, self-calibration and self-validation. The main purpose of smart sensor networks is to reduce human intervention and management control in different systems. Everything in a smart sensor is specifically designed for targeted application. The major disadvantage of smart sensor is their high cost as compared to the traditional sensors due to integration of sensor and interfering circuit for managing sensor calibration.
Among the end-user industries of smart sensors, the consumer electronics industry is expected to be the largest user of smart sensors during 2016-2022. Also, the smart sensor market is expected to witness highest growth in consumer electronics industry during the forecast period. Smart sensors are used in consumer electronics to measure various parameters such as motion, temperature, and pressure among others. They are widely adopted in numerous devices such as smartphones, gaming consoles, PCs, home appliances, kitchen appliances, and others.
Based on sensor type, the smart pressure sensor is expected to hold the largest market during the forecast period, as this category has wide utilization in automotive, industrial, healthcare, and consumer electronics industries. Based on technology, MEMS-based smart sensor is expected to hold the largest share in the smart sensor market during 2016-2022. The CMOS-based smart sensor is expected to be the second largest market during the forecast period.
Increased terrorism activity and security issues further highlight the importance of smart sensor in counter terrorism applications such as GIS, TerrorView, FlexiSpy. The major challenges restraining the growth of market are complex structure, high replacement and deployment cost, and lack of customization of smart sensors. The wireless technological advancement in the smart sensor configuration is expected to create more growth opportunity in wearable devices, biomedical and healthcare sector.
The growing end user industries is the major factor for the increasing demand of sensing technologies in countries such as Japan, China, the U.S., and India. Geographically, North America is the largest market for smart sensors, whereas Asia-Pacific is expected to hold the largest share in the coming years as it is expected to become a centre for the trade of consumer electronics products in the near term.
The key players in the global smart sensor market are ABB LTD., Customer Sensor Technologies Inc., Analog Devices Inc., Eaton Corporation Plc., Honeywell International Inc., NXP Semiconductors, Infineon Technologies AG, Emerson Process Management, STMicroelectronics, TE Connectivity Ltd., Legrand S.A, Sensirion AG, Siemens AG, General Electric, InvenSense, Inc., Atmel Corporation and NXP Semiconductors N.V.
