Sony dominated the image sensor market for years, but lost 10 percent of the market in the last two years, falling from 53 percent to 43 percent. Rival Samsung's market share rose from 18 percent to at least 22 percent, driven by its own handset business, capacity expansion, and new customers.
The third-ranked image sensor maker is OmniVision, which was acquired by Will Semiconductor, with a 14 percent market share. Other manufacturers with single-digit market shares are STMicroelectronics, Onsemi, SK Hynix, Panasonic, and Canon.
Image Sensor Applications
Today, the two giants, Sony and Samsung, have their sights set on the automotive industry. Sony expects the image sensor market to grow at a compound annual growth rate of about 9% through 2030, driven by high-end smartphones, advanced driver assistance systems, industrial applications, and safety.
To turn the tide, Sony is embarking on expanding production capacity and technology upgrades to diversify from smartphones to cars, virtual reality, and other applications.
METI announced on June 17 that it plans to provide up to 476 billion yen in subsidies to Japan Advanced Semiconductor Manufacturing (JASM), a joint venture between TSMC, Sony, and Toyota Group Denso, to support its semiconductor manufacturing projects on the island of Kyushu. Products produced at the plant may include image sensor data signal processors, automotive ICs, and other logic devices.
In addition, Sony plans to spend 900 billion yen in capital expenditures related to image sensors as of March 2024, including the expansion of Fab 5 in Nagasaki. To increase its share of the image sensing market, Sony is developing imaging technologies for more sophisticated smartphone cameras, interchangeable lens cameras, advanced driver assistance systems, and ultimately autonomous driving, industrial applications, augmented reality, and virtual reality. Higher resolution and speed are inevitable demands of the future market.
Driver Assistance Applications
In automotive applications, assisted driving systems include six to eight front-view, surround-view, and rear-view cameras per vehicle, and autonomous service vehicles will require 16 to 20 cameras. These lenses all need to have higher resolution in sync with light detection and ranging.
Consumer electronics include high-end smartphone cameras, virtual reality applications include AR&VR glasses, iris recognition, gaze detection, and industrial applications include production line monitoring, product inspection, logistics base sorting, and predictive maintenance.
Samsung did not show weakness, providing high-definition rear-view and surround-view displays in the automotive application market. Last year, Samsung introduced its first 200MP model with outstanding performance in low-light environments. The latest 200MP image sensor is 20% smaller, giving it the advantage of miniaturization. It is also reportedly working on an image sensor over 500MP that can match the resolution of the human eye.
200MP Image Sensor
Sony's pressure is not only coming from Samsung. OmniVision has a broader automotive imaging product line for automotive applications, including driver monitoring and other in-vehicle monitoring systems, lane recognition, vehicle and pedestrian detection, and blind spot coverage. Complements Will Semiconductor's product line, designing image sensors and related ICs for smartphones, virtual and artificial reality, portable computers, surveillance, and industrial and medical applications.
An image sensor is a light-sensitive component that converts optical images into electrical signals. It is widely used in digital cameras, digital TVs, and other electronic optical devices. Product categories are mainly divided into CCD, CMOS, and CIS sensors. The most common products today are CMOS image sensors, and the products mentioned above also belong to CMOS.
CMOS image sensor chips usually integrate image-sensitive cell arrays, row drivers, column drivers, timing control logic, AD converters, data bus output interfaces, and control interfaces. It stands for Complimentary Metal Oxide Semiconductor, a technology used to make microprocessors, memory chips, and most other ICs.
The price of CMOS is low, and its chip structure is easy to integrate with other silicon-based components, which can effectively reduce the cost of the entire system. Therefore, with the improvement of the technical level, it has replaced the CCD as the mainstream of the market.