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SITRI and CEA-Leti, in affiliation with MINATEC, this week announced the signing of a comprehensive agreement for ongoing collaboration and cooperation in developing new technologies to power the emerging Internet of Things (IoT) market.

The agreement combines the respective strengths of CEA-Leti and SITRI to accelerate the commercialization of innovative “More than Moore” technologies and develop the ecosystem needed to bring new ideas and companies in this space to the market. The framework agreement broadly covers all joint areas of research at SITRI and CEA-Leti, including microelectromechanical systems (MEMS) and sensors, 5G radio-frequency (RF) front ends, ultra-low power computing and communication, radio-frequency silicon-on-insulator (RF-SOI) and fully depleted silicon-on-insulator (FD-SOI) technologies.

“Through this agreement and SITRI’s established platform for “More than Moore” commercialization, we can accelerate the adoption of these latest technologies and create a global innovation ecosystem for emerging IoT applications,”said Charles Yang, President of SITRI.

“We are confident that this collaboration will be positive for China’s electronics industry, as well as for the Grenoble region’s growing SOI technology ecosystem,” said MINATEC Director Jean-Charles Guibert. Adds Marie-Noëlle Semeria, CEO of Leti, “Through this partnership, SITRI, MINATEC, CEA-Leti and the entire ecosystem will be able to promote and extend this ecosystem to SOI partners worldwide, and provide SOI solutions to the emerging Chinese IoT market.”

SOI, or “Silicon on Insulator,” is a key technology in the development of Moore’s Law and
“More than Moore” solutions for the IC industry. SOI brings cost, performance, power and integration advantages to the areas of ICs, RF, MEMS, and communications.

SITRI (Shanghai Industrial µTechnology Research Institute) is an innovation center established to accelerate the development and commercialization of “More than Moore” solutions to power the Internet of Things.

CEA-Leti serves as a bridge between basic research and production of micro- and nanotechnologies that improve the lives of people around the world. It is committed to creating innovation and transferring it to industry. With a staff of more than 1,900, Leti is based in Grenoble, France, and has offices in Silicon Valley, Calif., and Tokyo.

The MINATEC innovation campus is home to 3,000 researchers, 1,200 students, and 600 business and technology transfer experts on a 20-hectare campus with 13,000 m² of clean room space.

The semiconductor IP market is expected to reach $7.01 billion USD by 2022 from USD 3.09 Billion in 2015, at a CAGR of 10.55% between 2016 and 2022, according to the newly released report “Semiconductor (Silicon) IP Market by Form Factor (Integrated Circuit IP, SOC IP), Design Architecture (Hard IP, Soft IP), Processor Type (Microprocessor, DSP), Application, Geography and Verification IP – Forecast & Analysis to 2022”, published by MarketsandMarkets.

The driving factors for the growth of this market include increasing demand for advanced SoCs in the consumer sector, increased funding from governments and investors, emerging IoT ecosystem, recovering automotive sector, and growing popularity of miniaturized devices.

SoC IP had the largest market in 2015

Increase in the demand of smarter and power-efficient electronic devices, demand for multi-core technologies and embedded graphics are the major driving factors for the SoC market. SoCs are being utilized by all smart devices currently, such as smart phones, communication equipment, next-gen automotive, and electrocardiogram (ECG) telemetry devices. The increasing demand for energy efficient devices has led to development of newer SoCs which are more compact in size, faster response time than their predecessors and even consumes much lesser power. Moreover, the increased demand for multi-core technologies and embedded graphics has led to development of advanced SoCs.

Embedded processor IP devices expected to led the semiconductor processor IP market during the forecast period

Increasing demand for pervasive M2M (machine-to-machine) connectivity and a rich user experience across industries has spurred new opportunities for growth in both traditional and emerging embedded processor market. Emerging multi-core processors such as quad-core and octa-core for enhanced real-time experience in smart consumer electronics such as smartphones and smart wearables is expected to drive the embedded processor IP market.

The mobile & tablets segment expected to dominate the semiconductor IP market during the forecast period

A Strong consumer demand for smartphones, tablets, and other mobile devices is fueling significant growth within the semiconductor industry, and the rush to develop differentiated and powerful mobile solutions is driving rapid change within the entire ecosystem. Mobile phones and tablets have become the necessity of every individual which has increased the demand for the same; this is expected to drive the semiconductor IP market. Key players in the market such as Synopsys (U.S.), ARM (U.K.), and Rambus (U.S.) design chips exclusively to cater this application sector because of its growth potential.

The market in APAC expected to grow at the highest CAGR during the forecast period 

APAC is expected to hold the largest share of the semiconductor IP market by 2022. The major reasons for this are the governments in China, Taiwan, and Japan are actively attempting to boost the domestic semiconductor market and assist local companies in expanding their business globally; Chinese consumers and companies are becoming increasingly important to the growth of the global semiconductor market; increased funding from both government and private sources, is leading to merger, acquisition, investment, and partnership opportunities worldwide.

IoT Planet, a new European event dedicated to the Internet of Things (IoT), will co-locate this year with SEMICON Europa (25-27 October) in Grenoble, France.  IoT Planet provides a platform of networking and business to all IoT actors from software development, data management, IT infrastructures, system integration and “Connected Objects” applications.

For over 40 years, SEMI has organized SEMICON Europa, which has served as the premier annual European event for the electronics industry. In 2016, SEMICON Europa will connect the entire electronics supply chain: from materials and equipment, to manufacturing and technology, to advanced packaging and smart system integration – with a strong emphasis on application-driven markets, including Imaging, Power Electronics, Automotive, MedTech, and Flexible Hybrid Electronics.

IoT Planet, in its second year, will cover the full IoT domain with a unique format in mixing exhibition, Start-Up programs, crash tests, hackathon, forums, and debates, and many other events co-designed with the Partners. IoT Planet will connect professional visitors and high tech public across the domains of IoT applications, business, services, societal and private impact and talent management.

Together, the co-located events will offer visitors many learning and networking options along an extended supply chain. The events are expected to attract over 7,000 professional visitors and more than 600 exhibiting companies.

“Tomorrow’s applications will allow people to live smarter – healthier, safer, and more comfortable. The emerging opportunities are endless in smart electronic systems, but technology and system challenges must be overcome by connecting forces and by building on the strengths of different players in the value chain,” says Laith Altimime, president of SEMI Europe. “The co-location of these two events perfectly supports the SEMI 2020 strategy and will accelerate SEMI’s move towards covering the full electronics supply chain.”

“That initiative of co-location will contribute to our fast growth and strong differentiation, while providing a unique European opportunity to explore the full value chain from Silicon to Connected Object, in Grenoble, the European capital of Nanotechnologies and Connected Things,” says Alain Astier, president of IoT Planet UNIVERSAL.

For more information, please visit www.semiconeuropa.org and www.iot-planet.org.

EV Group (EVG), a supplier of wafer bonding and lithography equipment for the MEMS, nanotechnology and semiconductor markets, today announced that its EVG GEMINI 300mm automated wafer bonding system is ready for implementation into MEMS high-volume manufacturing (HVM). This marks an important milestone for the MEMS industry, which until now has utilized smaller 200mm wafer substrates for MEMS HVM. The combination of industry-leading alignment and excellent temperature and pressure uniformity for high-force permanent bonding on EVG’s benchmark, production-proven GEMINI 300mm platform now brings this critical process to 300mm MEMS manufacturing. In addition, the ability of the GEMINI wafer bonder to support 300mm MEMS manufacturing enables more cost-effective implementation of emerging applications, such as CMOS-MEMS integration.

According to market research and strategy consulting firm Yole Développement, the consumer MEMS market is projected to achieve a 12.3 percent compound annual growth rate (CAGR) from 2015 to 2020, with much of this demand being driven by the need for increasingly sophisticated, more numerous and lower-cost bulk acoustic wave (BAW) filters and microphones for smart phones and other mobile electronic devices. To support this growing demand, MEMS manufacturers will need to increase their production capacity as well as integrate more complex manufacturing processes in their production flow.

Many MEMS devices have very small moving parts, which must be protected from the ambient environment. High-force permanent wafer bonding allows wafer-level capping of MEMS devices, which seals a wafer’s worth of MEMS devices in one operation—after which the capped devices can then be packaged in a much simpler and lower-cost package. Enabling this process on larger 300-mm substrates, EVG’s GEMINI platform allows MEMS manufacturers to increase production yields as well as lower their overall cost of production. At the same time, the GEMINI’s ability to perform permanent bonding of 300mm MEMS wafers allows for CMOS-MEMS integration—the combining of CMOS and MEMS technology to enable more sophisticated integrated MEMS devices—without requiring chip-to-wafer bonding or wire bonding, which can increase production costs or increase the footprint of the MEMS device.

“For more than 15 years, EV Group has revolutionized automated wafer bonding, and established itself as the clear technology and market leader with the largest installed base of automated production wafer bonding systems worldwide,” stated Paul Lindner, executive technology director at EV Group. “Representing the first platform to incorporate all wafer bonding process steps in a single automated system, GEMINI has proven to be one of our most successful products. As part of EVG’s Triple-i philosophy, we have continually innovated this product over the years to achieve new levels of capability and performance for our customers, including supporting advanced packaging HVM applications such as CMOS image sensors and 3D-ICs. Now, we are bringing the capabilities and success of this versatile platform to our MEMS customers to support their evolving needs—whether it be higher production capacity to meet rising consumer demand, more integrated MEMS systems with improved functionality and accuracy, or new types of devices enabled by CMOS/MEMS integration.”

The GEMINI 300-mm automated wafer bonder incorporates many features to enable high throughput, high post-bond yield and low cost of ownership, including:

  • EVG’s SmartView NT automated bond alignment system, which provides sub-micron alignment accuracy and transfer of the aligned wafer pair using proprietary bond chuck technology. This is crucial for ensuring optimal wafer-to-wafer bond yields
  • A modular design that allows customers to customize, scale or even reconfigure their systems for different bond processes according to their production needs
  • Integrated wafer preparation and conditioning, including oxide removal, which is critical to ensuring maximum bond strength between wafers
  • Swap-in modules for rapid changeover and optimum serviceability, depending on bond processes and pre-processing needs
  • Ability to handle bond temperatures of up to 500 degrees Celsius and bond forces up to 100 kilonewtons (kN)
  • Optimized temperature uniformity as well as controlled rapid heating and cooling capability

Demonstrations of the EVG GEMINI 300mm wafer bonder for MEMS applications are available at EVG’s headquarters in St. Florian, Austria.

Gartner, Inc. has highlighted the top 10 Internet of Things (IoT) technologies that should be on every organization’s radar through the next two years.

“The IoT demands an extensive range of new technologies and skills that many organizations have yet to master,” said Nick Jones, vice president and distinguished analyst at Gartner. “A recurring theme in the IoT space is the immaturity of technologies and services and of the vendors providing them. Architecting for this immaturity and managing the risk it creates will be a key challenge for organizations exploiting the IoT. In many technology areas, lack of skills will also pose significant challenges.”

The technologies and principles of IoT will have a very broad impact on organizations, affecting business strategy, risk management and a wide range of technical areas such as architecture and network design. The top 10 IoT technologies for 2017 and 2018 are:

IoT Security

The IoT introduces a wide range of new security risks and challenges to the IoT devices themselves, their platforms and operating systems, their communications, and even the systems to which they’re connected. Security technologies will be required to protect IoT devices and platforms from both information attacks and physical tampering, to encrypt their communications, and to address new challenges such as impersonating “things” or denial-of-sleep attacks that drain batteries. IoT security will be complicated by the fact that many “things” use simple processors and operating systems that may not support sophisticated security approaches.

“Experienced IoT security specialists are scarce, and security solutions are currently fragmented and involve multiple vendors,” said Mr. Jones. “New threats will emerge through 2021 as hackers find new ways to attack IoT devices and protocols, so long-lived “things” may need updatable hardware and software to adapt during their life span.”

IoT Analytics

IoT business models will exploit the information collected by “things” in many ways — for example, to understand customer behavior, to deliver services, to improve products, and to identify and intercept business moments. However, IoT demands new analytic approaches. New analytic tools and algorithms are needed now, but as data volumes increase through 2021, the needs of the IoT may diverge further from traditional analytics.

IoT Device (Thing) Management

Long-lived nontrivial “things” will require management and monitoring. This includes device monitoring, firmware and software updates, diagnostics, crash analysis and reporting, physical management, and security management. The IoT also brings new problems of scale to the management task. Tools must be capable of managing and monitoring thousands and perhaps even millions of devices.

Low-Power, Short-Range IoT Networks

Selecting a wireless network for an IoT device involves balancing many conflicting requirements, such as range, battery life, bandwidth, density, endpoint cost and operational cost. Low-power, short-range networks will dominate wireless IoT connectivity through 2025, far outnumbering connections using wide-area IoT networks. However, commercial and technical trade-offs mean that many solutions will coexist, with no single dominant winner and clusters emerging around certain technologies, applications and vendor ecosystems.

Low-Power, Wide-Area Networks

Traditional cellular networks don’t deliver a good combination of technical features and operational cost for those IoT applications that need wide-area coverage combined with relatively low bandwidth, good battery life, low hardware and operating cost, and high connection density. The long-term goal of a wide-area IoT network is to deliver data rates from hundreds of bits per second (bps) to tens of kilobits per second (kbps) with nationwide coverage, a battery life of up to 10 years, an endpoint hardware cost of around $5, and support for hundreds of thousands of devices connected to a base station or its equivalent. The first low-power wide-area networks (LPWANs) were based on proprietary technologies, but in the long term emerging standards such as Narrowband IoT (NB-IoT) will likely dominate this space.

IoT Processors

The processors and architectures used by IoT devices define many of their capabilities, such as whether they are capable of strong security and encryption, power consumption, whether they are sophisticated enough to support an operating system, updatable firmware, and embedded device management agents. As with all hardware design, there are complex trade-offs between features, hardware cost, software cost, software upgradability and so on. As a result, understanding the implications of processor choices will demand deep technical skills.

IoT Operating Systems

Traditional operating systems (OSs) such as Windows and iOS were not designed for IoT applications. They consume too much power, need fast processors, and in some cases, lack features such as guaranteed real-time response. They also have too large a memory footprint for small devices and may not support the chips that IoT developers use. Consequently, a wide range of IoT-specific operating systems has been developed to suit many different hardware footprints and feature needs.

Event Stream Processing

Some IoT applications will generate extremely high data rates that must be analyzed in real time. Systems creating tens of thousands of events per second are common, and millions of events per second can occur in some telecom and telemetry situations. To address such requirements, distributed stream computing platforms (DSCPs) have emerged. They typically use parallel architectures to process very high-rate data streams to perform tasks such as real-time analytics and pattern identification.

IoT Platforms

IoT platforms bundle many of the infrastructure components of an IoT system into a single product. The services provided by such platforms fall into three main categories: (1) low-level device control and operations such as communications, device monitoring and management, security, and firmware updates; (2) IoT data acquisition, transformation and management; and (3) IoT application development, including event-driven logic, application programming, visualization, analytics and adapters to connect to enterprise systems.

IoT Standards and Ecosystems

Although ecosystems and standards aren’t precisely technologies, most eventually materialize as application programming interfaces (APIs). Standards and their associated APIs will be essential because IoT devices will need to interoperate and communicate, and many IoT business models will rely on sharing data between multiple devices and organizations.

Many IoT ecosystems will emerge, and commercial and technical battles between these ecosystems will dominate areas such as the smart home, the smart city and healthcare. Organizations creating products may have to develop variants to support multiple standards or ecosystems and be prepared to update products during their life span as the standards evolve and new standards and related APIs emerge.

More detailed analysis is available for Gartner clients in the report “Top 10 IoT Technologies for 2017 and 2018.” This report is part of the Gartner Special Report “The Internet of Things“, which looks at the necessary steps to building and rolling out an IoT strategy.

Today, at the 2016 Mobile World Congress, Bosch Sensortec introduces its first generation of sensor hub products with optimized vital sensing features. These devices fuse photoplethysmography (PPG) signals with the onboard inertial MEMS sensors signals for robust, motion compensated heart rate measurement and provide users with valuable insights about their wellbeing and fitness level using Firstbeat’s field-proven vital analytics algorithms.

Vital analytics for an enhanced user experience

These new BHV250 and BHV160 sensors are designed for always-on sensor enabled wearable applications such as fitness wristbands, earphones and smart textiles. As a complete sensor solution they feature ultra-low power consumption in a compact package, with integrated software and a wide-range support for different PPG chipsets. The integrated software from Firstbeat processes raw sensor data to open up a world of motion-compensated vital monitoring, activity recognition applications and gesture based user interfaces.

The unique combination of the Bosch’s Vital Sensor Hubs with Firstbeat’s extensive vital analytics software enables a rich user experience by providing the tools for sleep analysis, calorie consumption calculation, fitness training evaluation, and “stress and recovery” monitoring. The myriad of future applications is only limited by the designer’s imagination.

“With this all-round sensor subsystem, our customers can now focus on providing added value to their end users, confident in the knowledge that they have a highly integrated, ultra-low power solution”, said Jeanne Forget-Funk, VP Marketing at Bosch Sensortec. “With the fitness tracking and wearables markets expanding so rapidly, we await with great interest the explosion of innovation that will be triggered by this technology.”

“Firstbeat’s analytics software creates a digital model of a user’s physiology through advanced modeling of heart function and heart rate variability (HRV)”, said Joni Kettunen, CEO and Co-founder of Firstbeat. “The Bosch sensor subsystem provides the accurate data and flexible programmability that enables our software to deliver new insights to users at ultra-low power consumption.”

Product details

The BHV250 and BHV160 integrate innovative 3- respectively 6-axis inertial MEMS sensors designed around the new Bosch Sensortec DSP ‘Fuser Core’ powering Firstbeat’s vital analytics software. Both devices include an accelerometer, and the BHV160 also includes a gyroscope.

The Android Wear-compatible sensor hubs are the components with the lowest power consumption available on the market today, helping to significantly extend system battery life time. 

The sensor hubs have tiny footprints that are indispensable for applications where space is tight. The BHV160 measures 3 x 3 x 0.95 mm3, while the BHV250 only a mere 2.2 x 2.2 x 0.95 mm3.

Samples are available today to qualified customers. Mass production is ramping up in Q2 2016. For pricing, please contact Bosch Sensortec.

Market forecast

According to industry analysts, wearables are a market of increasing importance. IDC predicts that by 2019, total shipments in the wearables market will reach some 214 million units.

IC Insights recently released its new Global Wafer Capacity 2016-2020 report that provides in-depth detail, analyses, and forecasts for IC industry capacity by wafer size, by process geometry, by region, and by product type through 2020.

Researchers estimate that there are about 80,000 earthquakes globally each year, but most are too minor to notice. The Great East Japan Earthquake (a.k.a., 2011 Tohoku Earthquake) and subsequent tsunami that struck east of Sendai on March 11, 2011 caused substantial loss of life and destruction to infrastructure. It was the most powerful earthquake ever to hit Japan and the fifth most powerful in the world since records started being kept in 1900. Many semiconductor fabs, as well as other facilities that support the industry, were significantly damaged by the quake (some were shut down permanently as a result).

Since the earliest days of IC production in Silicon Valley, the IC industry has always had much of its fabrication facilities located in seismically active regions. Moreover, as of December 2015, roughly half of the world’s total IC wafer production capacity was located in seismically active areas (defined as areas having moderate to high risk of being significantly impacted by earthquake tremors).

  • Taiwan and Japan accounted for 39% of global IC capacity in December of 2015. Both countries are considered entirely seismically active, and have large amounts of IC capacity exposed to potential earthquake damage.
  • Even though Southeast Asia is generally considered very active seismically, Singapore and Malaysia are actually considered relatively safe from earthquake damage. In China, Beijing is considered to have moderate-to-high seismic risk, but other cities such as Shanghai, Shenzhen, and Wuxi are considered to be “on solid ground.” Similarly, while the Southern part of France has moderate seismic risk, the Central and Northern areas do not.

As shown in Figure 1, 64% of pure-play IC foundry capacity is located in seismically active regions. Since two of the largest pure-play IC foundries in the world (TSMC and UMC) have such a significant presence in Taiwan, a disastrous earthquake or typhoon in that country would have serious ramifications for the entire electronics supply chain. In fact, because IC foundries have so many different customers and are sole-source producers for such a wide variety of part types, the ramifications of damage to IC foundry fabrication facilities would be much greater than damage done to individual IDM IC fabs.

Figure 1

Figure 1

A few years ago, IC Insights was contracted to perform a proprietary market research report for a large insurance company.  This company wanted to develop a model that showed how much in electronic system sales would be lost if the fabs in Taiwan were shut down for one, two, or three months due to damage caused by an earthquake or typhoon.  When considering only the Hsinchu Science Park, which is home to about 45% of the island nation’s total wafer capacity, it was determined that, for each month of net loss resulting from the Hsinchu fabs being out of operation, a $9.3 billion net negative effect would be exerted on worldwide electronic system sales!

Although the IC industry has always had the majority of its fabrication capacity located in “dangerous” areas, most buyers of ICs don’t give this a second thought.  Ultimately, all that really can be said about the ability to predict devastating natural disasters is that everything is just “fine” until one day it isn’t. However, while these tragic events are impossible to predict, they are not impossible to plan for.  The Great East Japan Earthquake should have been a wake-up call to spur the entire electronics supply chain to create new contingency plans, just in case.

Gartner, Inc. forecasts that 274.6 million wearable electronic devices will be sold worldwide in 2016, an increase of 18.4 percent from 232.0 million units in 2015 (see Table 1). Sales of wearable electronic devices will generate revenue of $28.7 billion in 2016. Of that, $11.5 billion will be from smartwatches.

“From 2015 through 2017, smartwatch adoption will have 48 percent growth largely due to Apple popularizing wearables as a lifestyle trend. Smartwatches have the greatest revenue potential among all wearables through 2019, reaching $17.5 billion,” said Angela McIntyre, research director at Gartner. “Though the sales of smartwatches are the one of the strongest types of wearables, their adoption will remain much below sales of smartphones. For example, in 2016 more than 374 million smartphones will sell in mature market countries and in large urban areas of emerging market countries, for example, in Hong Kong and Singapore.”

Table 1: Forecast for Wearable Devices Worldwide (Millions of Units)

Device

2015

2016

2017
Smartwatch

30.32

50.40

66.71
Head-mounted display

0.14

1.43

6.31
Body-worn camera

0.05

0.17

1.05
Bluetooth headset

116.32

128.50

139.23
Wristband

30.15

34.97

44.10
Smart garment

0.06

1.01

5.30
Chest strap

12.88

13.02

7.99
Sports watch

21.02

23.98

26.92
Other fitness monitor

21.07

21.11

25.08
Total

232.01

274.59

322.69

Source: Gartner (January 2016)

Fitness wearables — which include wristbands, smart garments, chest straps, sports watches and other fitness monitors — continue to increase in popularity, driven in some part by U.S. wellness programs.

“Of all the fitness wearables, sports watches will be the one product category to maintain its average retail price over the next several years,” said Ms. McIntyre. “Race runners, cyclists and divers will choose sports watches over smartwatches because the user interface, capabilities and durability are tailored to the needs of an athlete in their sport. Continued advances in sensors and analytics for sports watches will bring new capabilities that bolster average retail prices.”

Although the size of the worldwide wristband market was on par with the unit sales of smartwatches in 2015, looking forward smartwatches will have stronger appeal with consumers as they typically have more multifunctional devices that can track exercise. Wristband providers are experimenting with how to compete with smartwatches and take market share from the market leader, Fitbit. Examples of emerging value propositions for wristbands beyond fitness include mobile payments, access, safety, wellness and health.

Head-mounted displays (HMDs) are an emerging market with origins as expensive military projects, and in 2016 the HMD market will progress toward mainstream adoption for consumers and enterprise use. “New virtual reality HMDs for consumers, such as the HTC Vive, Oculus Rift, Sony PlayStation VR, and Microsoft HoloLens are expected to be available along with video games and entertainment content as well as business applications critical for their success,” said Brian Blau, research director at Gartner. “Film producers and sports leagues will augment their traditional content through HMDs to enhance their customer experiences by creating interactive attractions, movies, and sporting events that make the content more personal and meaningful.”

Enterprise use of HMDs will also grow in the coming years with 26 percent of HMDs designed for business use in 2018. HMDs will be purchased by businesses for use by employees for tasks such as equipment repair, inspections and maintenance. Workers also will use HMDs for viewing instructions and directions hands free while they are performing a task.

Additional information is available in the report “Forecast: Wearable Electronic Devices, Worldwide, 2016.”Further analysis on the wristband market can be found in the report “Market Trends: Wristbands, Worldwide, 2015.”

The wearable technology market continues to rapidly expand, driving more than $40 billion in revenue by 2020. There were 23 million wireless-charging-enabled wearable products shipped in 2015, and by 2020 40 percent of all wearable devices shipped will be enabled to charge wirelessly. Smartwatches are set to be the largest contributor to the wirelessly charged wearables market, accounting for almost 40 percent of all wearable-device wireless-charging receivers shipped in 2020, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), a global source of critical information and insight,

“Smartwatches are a key driver for wireless charging adoption in the wearable market, as both the Apple Watch and the Samsung Gear S2 use inductive wireless charging technology as the only method of recharging the battery,” said Vicky Yussuff, wireless power analyst for IHS Technology. “By 2020, Apple and Samsung are expected to account for almost half of all smartwatch shipments; significantly increasing the number of wireless charging-enabled devices available to consumers.”

As with any other application, the key appeal of integrating wireless charging into wearable devices is the improvement in convenience it offers end users; however, in contrast to mobile phones and other consumer devices, wireless charging is typically the only way to charge smartwatches and other wearables. For example, the Samsung Galaxy S6 and Samsung Galaxy S6 Edge mobile phones are both enabled for wireless charging, but they also include a micro USB cable for traditional charging. In contrast, the Samsung Gear S2 smartwatch is also enabled to charge wirelessly, but has no wired connection; it is shipped with its own dedicated wireless charging transmitter dock, which is the only way to recharge the device battery.

Wearable devices come in various form factors, which presents challenges for wireless charging, because alignment becomes more difficult and more spatial freedom is required. “Magnetic resonance technology offers greater spatial freedom than an inductive solution and thus would best support the use case for wearable technology,” Yussuff said. “Delays in the commercial release of magnetic resonance solutions have created opportunity for inductive solutions to gain widespread adoption in the short term, before magnetic resonance market share increases towards 2020.”

Some progress in uncoupled technology using radio frequency was recently demonstrated by Energous Corporation at the Consumer Electronics Show (CES). The company demonstrated power transmission using its first miniature WattUp transmitter, which accompanies a receiver chip that is specially designed to easily fit small wearable devices. Ossia also grabbed headlines at CES this year. The company demonstrated its “Cota” uncoupled wireless power platform and announced a recent investment by Molex, as Energous chases its first commercial launch of consumer-ready products.

“Overall, the early adoption of inductive technology by Apple, Samsung and some others is a step in the right direction, but there are still some challenges that need to be addressed before wireless charging technology can become mature in the market for wearable technology,” Yussuff said.  “At this stage, the biggest objective for many stakeholders is to avoid negative customer experiences that could create further barriers to adoption in the future.  Rising adoption and an increasing customer base will only help fuel more demand for this feature on devices — especially in an application where wireless charging can provide so many benefits.”

Fingerprint sensors, used primarily for mobile device login and payment security systems, have become an expected feature in high-end smartphones and, to a lesser extent, in tablets and notebook computers. Led by Apple’s iPhone juggernaut, unit shipments of fingerprint sensors were expected to have grown from 316 million in 2014 to 499 million in 2015 and will continue to increase each year to peak at 1.6 billion in 2020, according to IHS Inc. (NYSE: IHS), a global source of critical information and insight.

“The market for fingerprint sensors has heated up quickly, with explosive growth expected to continue in 2016 and beyond,” said Jamie Fox, principal analyst for IHS Technology. “The highest revenue growth is likely to be in the short term, as the market becomes more competitive, price erosion continues and the high-end smartphone market matures and becomes more saturated.”

Apple, which acquired fingerprint-sensor maker Authentec in 2012, continued to lead the fingerprint sensor market in 2015, due mainly to the popularity of its iPhone 6S and iPad product lines. Fingerprint Cards (FPC), with a wide range of customers in China and elsewhere, came from behind to tie second-ranked Samsung-supplier Synaptics in unit shipments in 2015; however, FPC actually led Synaptics in 2015 revenues at $316 million.

“As more smartphone brands have adopted fingerprint sensors, the market has expanded, and FPC reacted very quickly to the industry’s trend, shifting away from swipe sensors,” Fox said. “FPC’s strong customer-base in China also helped catapult the company into the top three fingerprint sensor makers in 2015.”

The current market for fingerprint sensors relies on capacitive sensors; however, led by Qualcomm, ultrasonic sensors that are even more resistant to user impersonation will soon enter the market. “InvenSense is another company to watch because it is expected to introduce its own line of ultrasonic fingerprint sensors in 2017,” Fox said.