Think Small! - The Newsletter of WTC

Eight-inch Mems fabs are hardly nothing new. In revenue terms, a major part of the Mems market has been processed on 8-inch lines since 2001, when Texas Instruments moved to 200 mm production. For many years, though, TI was the only significant manufacturer and the opportunity forequipment and wafer suppliers was limited. Since 2005, a handful of companies have joined the 8-inch group; these are...

Investment has been literally pouring into the production of thin-film solar cells, regardless of the technology under consideration. However, the market for each technology differs greatly. While just one year ago it could appear that cadmium telluride was still in the starting blocks (after many years of waiting for the signal to run), such cells are clearly winning the race for...

Few MEMS components have created so much excitement, and then such disappointment in so short a time. Is this component finally in production? Will there be an ineresting market? And for whom? We have been following RF MEMS swithces since 2000 and have just updated our technical and market analysis. Although the marked was just $6 million last year, it will increase to $210 million in 2011....

The automotive sector has long been a growth market for MEMS sensors. However, the industry continues to change and face new opportunities and challenges—regulations, saturation in some applications and price erosion issues, to name a few. Today’s high-end vehicles feature up to 100 different sensors.  ...

WTC has recently taken the pulse of the mems industry to answer the question: just how healthy is the industry? Over the period of February to March 2007 wtc carried out a global bottom-up survey of the top 60 mems companies, examining for each company the current mems revenues, products, applications and views on the major changes ...

The difficulty in securing a feedstock supply to produce conventional wafer-based solar cells has encouraged a frenzy of industry projects related to thin-film solar cells. Wtc has counted some 34 companies developing and in some cases building production lines for thin-film cells. Last year saw First Solar, Nanosolar and...

A flurry of announcements during the year have resurrected interest in rf mems oscillators. Wtc believes that these devices have a nice future, but warns of some confusion and inflated expectations. MEMS oscillators are nothing new. The first publications mentioning rf mems resonators for oscillator applications appeared in...

After years spent playing catch up with LCDs, organic light emitting diode (OLED) displays seem to be finally closing the distance. The first mobile phone sporting an OLED main display - the BenQSiemens S88 - was introduced earlier this year. It includes a 2.2-inch, 176 × 220 full-colour active matrix OLED (AMOLED) ...

The market for mems inertial sensors (accelerometers and gyroscopes) is set to grow from $835 million in 2004 to over $1360 million in 2009 —a cagr of 10%. Currently, the main applications are in the automotive industry. These markets are well established and growth rates range from a stagnant 1% for airbag acceleration...

Silicon micromachined microphones have recently begun to emerge as a competitor technology to the electret condenser microphone (ECM), a device first developed by Bell Labs way back in the 1960s. Today, MEMS microphones amount to just tens of millions of units, but by 2009 will have carved out an estimated $500 million piece...