MEMS | ARTICLE Introduction
Chris Anderson, writing in WIRED magazine, introduced the concept of ‘Long Tail’ markets to describe his observations about the online sale of consumer entertainment material — books, music and DVDs — by companies like Amazon, Apple, and Netlix, respectively (figure 1).
Most sales were actually coming from outside the ‘Fat Head’ of the distribution curve; per Anderson: “What’s really amazing about the Long Tail is the sheer size of it. Combine enough nonhits on the Long Tail and you’ve got a market bigger than the hits. Take books: the average Barnes & Noble carries 130,000 titles. Yet more than half of Amazon’s book sales come from outside its top 130,000 titles.” [C. Anderson, Wired, October 2004.]
Anderson noted that “… [I]ndustry has a poor sense of what people want. … We assume, for instance, that there is litle demand for the stuff that isn’t carried by Wal-Mart and other major retailers; if people wanted it, surely it would be sold. Te rest, the botom 80%, must be subcommercial at best.”
“But as egalitarian as Wal-Mart may seem, it is actually extraordinarily elitist. Wal-Mart must sell at least 100,000 copies of a CD to cover its retail overhead and make a sufficient profit; less than 1% of CDs do that kind of volume. What about the people who would like to buy… non mainstream fare? Tey have to go somewhere else.”
<< Figure 2: AMFitzgerald’s RocketMEMS programme allows customisation of MEMS pressure sensors for the Long Tail marketplace at reduced cost, time, and risk.>>
Mega Platorm MEMS
Te Micro Electro Mechanical Systems industry has a sturdy head of MEMS products that account for much of its annual unit volume shipments; MEMS sensors have found receptive homes in the smartphone space, in the automotive industry and in consumer electronic applications.
To get some recent perspective on smartphone unit shipments, Forbes Magazine wrote on 4 September 2013 that “thanks to lower-cost devices, steep subsidies from wireless carriers and the popularity of mobile apps, smartphone shipments are expected to surge 40% this year, topping 1 billion units in a year for the first time, according to market researcher IDC.” [C. Guglielmo, Forbes,
4 September 2013.] Multiply that by the number of MEMS sensors per smartphone, four or more, and you have something like a 4 billion device plus market per year for smartphone MEMS.
As for worldwide automotive shipments, “double-digit growth in North America and the Asia-Pacific region more than compensated for a downturn in Europe and tepid growth in South America, pushing full-year 2012 global vehicle sales to 81.8 million units...” [ J. Sousanis, WardsAuto, 01 Feb 2013.] With 60 or more sensors per vehicle, automotive MEMS is also a multi-billion devices per year market.
Markets of these sizes easily justify the high investments needed to develop and manufacture a new MEMS device.
34 | commercial micro manufacturing international Vol 7 No.6
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