MONTREAL, March 21, 2012 /ATR-Newswire/  ELECTRONICS.CA PUBLICATIONS, the electronics industry market research and knowledge network, announces the availability of a new report entitled "Microcontrollers".

Worldwide microcontroller market share for 2011 saw a few changes take place among top suppliers. The most noticeable change was that of Atmel, which climbed up the rankings with an increase in microcontroller revenue of 25 percent, according to estimates. Atmel is engaged in the growing touch screen controller market. While most of its revenue is contributed by sales to smart phone suppliers, there is a growing demand for touch screen technology in other consumer segments as well as the computer market.  Overall competition in this market from Atmel, Microchip Technology, and Infineon Technologies has become very close and is only separated by .8 percent between these competitors. Renesas Electronics retained its healthy lead as the number one supplier in 2011, regardless of the difficulties it faced in the Tohoku earthquake and tsunami. The company's slight one percent loss year over year is the largest change in revenue since its merger with NEC in 2009.

In terms of individual market segments, the automotive market easily represents the single largest application for microcontrollers with nearly $6 billion in global sales estimated for 2012.  That amount is 39 percent of the total 2012 microcontroller market. This segment is also slated to be one of the fastest growing overall with a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 9 percent until 2017. The consumer market is also forecasted to grow at the same 9 percent CAGR over the next five years. The smart cards market is the second fastest growing market within microcontrollers specifically; however, it is the emerging touch screen controller market that has seen significant growth. This is due to inclusion of these new interface devices in smart phones, consumer devices, and commercial or industrial controls.

It is interesting to see how the microcontroller market share shifts when the smart card segment is removed from the microcontroller revenue table. As you can see below a significant proportion of Freescale's growth did not include smart cards, while the rest of the top ten only moved a percentage point or two. This dynamic for analyzing microcontroller share also allows Synaptics and Cypress Semiconductor to make an appearance in the top ten with a 1.8 percent and 1.7 percent share respectively.

When the microcontroller market share is broken out a step further even more information about the competitive landscape becomes apparent. The next table examines what the worldwide microcontroller market share looks like without either smart cards or automotive microcontroller revenue included. The obvious difference is that automotive applications are the driving force to keeping this market positive overall in 2011. When market share is analyzed in this regard, Atmel shows the largest amount of revenue growth. This can be attributed to Atmel's success with the consumer market with its maXTouch controller business which is in over 8 smartphone designs.  Atmel's business also added another foundry partner in 2011, MagnaChip, to work with TSMC and UMC, as well as its own fabs. Cypress Semiconductor also made huge year over year gains in 2011 and doubled their market share in microcontrollers less smart cards and automotive. All of their revenue comes from mobile phone microcontrollers, in which they are the number 3 supplier.

Details of the new report, table of contents and ordering information can be found on Electronics.ca Publications' website. View the report: Microcontrollers