Because of the nature of its business, Farnell has got its ear to the
ground when it comes to deciphering market trends. In this introductory
article for our supplement, Steve Hallgate offers an analysis of trends
in one of his company's key markets - sensors
The sensor market began attracting attention a few years ago as industry
watchers started to recognise the promise it held as a major growth area.
In May 2000, Venture Development Corporation's (Natick, Mass) study, The
US Market for Proximity, Photoelectric, and Linear Displacement Sensors,
Sixth Edition, predicted that sales of these products would increase at a
compound annual growth rate of 6.6% from $910 million in 1999 to $1.25
billion in 2004. Similar figures today estimate growth of 6.7% annually
through to 2006 for the $9.6 billion general US sensor market, driven by
economic recovery in process control, industrial machinery and
conventional automotive applications.
The strong growth of the sensor market as a whole is no great surprise
when one considers that sensor technology is an integral part of the
overall development of products and services. During the past two
decades, there has been an unprecedented growth in the number of products
and services, which utilise information gained by processes that monitor
and measure using different types of sensor. For example:
? Physical sensors - generally measure position, proximity, level,
displacement, density, velocity, acceleration, force, strain, pressure
flow, vibration, temperature, radiation and electromagnetic field
? Chemical sensors - detect and quantify chemicals that may present in
gas, liquid, and solid phases * Non-contact temperature sensors -
possibly the largest class of commercial optical sensors, they use
techniques such as remote pyrometry, Raman scattering and rare-earth
absorption, and fluorescence monitoring
? Pressure Sensors - based on movable diaphragms, and widely used in
biomedical, process-control, marine and engine-control applications
? Fibre Optic Sensors - use communications technology to transmit signals
from a sensing element to a photo-detector, and they can transmit large
amounts of data over long distances
Within the sensor market itself, we can expect to see certain niche
products growing and developing more than others in relation to social
trends and demands. For example, optical sensors have become a
multi-million pound slice of an expanding global marketplace and, as an
enabling technology, are critical to a broad range of fields including
security, environmental, material and information science, transportation
and space exploration, construction and manufacturing, biology, chemistry
and medicine and many others.
Meanwhile, bio-sensors, studied since the 1960s, can be expected to play
an increasingly important role as we move forward into the 21st century
with bio-technology advances promising a medical revolution. Modern
bio-sensors, developed with advanced micro-fabrication and signal
processing techniques, are becoming inexpensive, accurate, and reliable,
whilst increasing miniaturisation of bio-sensors has enabled complex
analytical systems such as DNA micro-arrays and chemical/biological
laboratories-on-a-chip, to be produced. Rapid progress in the development
of miniature devices is expected to have a big impact on the medical,
defence, chemical production, environmental protection and pharmaceutical
sectors. In recent years, the trend in sensor design has been towards
increasingly compact devices, packed with features, with 'intelligence'
built in. Take the standard inductive proximity switch as an example. The
primary cause of failure of this type of sensor is front-end damage
arising from impact with the detected object. This has led to the
introduction of the HyperProx switch, an inductive device with up to four
times the standard sensing distance of stan