Emerging market opportunities for optoelectronics

25 June 2008 News

The worldwide optoelectronics market is set for strong growth.

Application designs are utilising these light-emitting and light-detecting products more and more, resulting in a global market of $17 billion today, with the potential to reach $31 billion by 2013. Most consumers are familiar with the high volume applications using optoelectronics, such as DVD systems and digital cameras. But other applications using optoelectronics today are in cars, medical instruments, and lamps.

In the automotive market, LEDs are being used extensively in interior lighting, and due to advances in technology, uses in exterior illumination will become mainstream down the road.

Low power consumption and longevity provide application designers and LED suppliers with significant motivation to advance this technology to the next level, with lower cost and brighter component solutions. Image sensors, found mainly in mobile phone and digital cameras, are also making their way into vehicles, adding additional safety features such as lane departure warning and rearview/blind spot assistance.

In medical electronics, a fast growing segment of the industrial market, optoelectronics are being used in oncology, endoscopy and imaging. A quickly advancing market for medical lasers is in cosmetic surgery and dermatology, where optoelectronics are key components.

LED lamps are set to grow in many markets. While demand for LEDs in backlighting will continue to be strong, applications that use LEDs as replacements for more traditional lighting sources offer a chance for significant growth, as manufacturers continue to advance performance of white LEDs.

Databeans predicts that global optoelectronics revenue for lighting and other consumer applications will grow at a compound annual growth rate of 14% over the next five years. This performance is followed by the medical market with a predicted growth rate of 13% and automotive with a growth rate of 12%. The communications segment continues to drive overall growth, with continued demand for image sensors in mobile handsets.

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