New analysis from Frost & Sullivan World Microcontrollers Market shows earned revenue of $13.7 billion in 2005 in this industry, with estimates to reach $22.7 billion in 2009.
Higher bit core microcontrollers are reaching into the industrial and automotive market segments. With increasing demand on comfort and safety requirements, the automotive market is facing high levels of requirements for higher bit core microcontrollers. Industrial applications like energy meter and medical test equipment use 16-bit architecture to meet the requirements. It is likely that these demands will further increase the need of higher bit microcontrollers to meet the performance requirements.
“Microcontrollers of all bit cores are used in vehicles,” says Frost & Sullivan Industry Manager Deepa Doraiswamy. “The 8 and 16-bit microcontrollers are used for low-end applications and lower cost vehicles, while the 32-bit microcontrollers are used for the high-end application and high-end vehicles.
Doraiswamy continued: “Currently 30 to 40 microcontrollers are used in low-end vehicles and about 70 microcontrollers are used in high-end vehicles. These requirements are continuously increasing and it is highly likely that the count of microcontrollers in vehicles will further increase in the future.”
Qualified software is necessary to run the applications on microcontrollers. Simple user interface with convenient compiling and debugging tools are necessary to program the microcontroller unit. This has been a challenge for microcontroller manufacturers and will likely continue to be one in the future.
“Semiconductor manufacturers can overcome this fear by providing qualified software support for applications that require them,” says Doraiswamy. “The software support can include for the provision of compiling and debugging tools which would be helpful for programming. This helps them give time for developing new solutions for the new technologies. Also, the software designs should be such that they could be easily upgradeable to meet the new requirements.”