Initially developed for the military market by US defense companies, infrared
(IR) uncooled cameras are now widely used in many commercial applications.
SALES WILL GROW FROM 320, 000 IN 2011 TO 1,1 M
UNITS IN 2017Commercial business is expanding at a high rate and
is driven by three main markets:
- Thermography market : still the largest commercial market, sales have boomed
in 2011. An increasing competition from new entrants from the power tool market
e.g. DeWALT, Milwaukee Tools will make camera price drop down below $1,000 and
accelerates thermal imaging adoption by new categories of users (electricians,
contractors…).
- Automotive market is concentrated in only one supplier, Autoliv, but has
increased sales by + 30% in volume in 2011. It is expected that IR cameras sales
for automotive will exceed 300,000 units in 2017, but installation rate in cars
will remain below 1% in the long term.
- Surveillance becomes a strategic market and focuses the attention of all IR
supply chain players : detector, core, and camera manufacturers. Major new
entrants from visible CCTV, and military markets have positioned on that growing
business and have started a price war.
- Commercial market will compensate for the decline of military market mainly
occupied by U.S. companies.
COST
REDUCTION INCREASING IN 2011 - 2012Cost driven price reduction
(-15% / year) is rapidly broadening the use of Infrared cameras in many
commercial markets and specially in thermography and surveillance markets. In
thermography, ultra low end cameras have been introduced with success by FLIR in
2010, and Dewalt will introduce a new model in 2012 at the breakthrough price of
$ 999. In surveillance, FLIR and Axis are competing heavily on the pricing and
DRS introduced a middle end camera at the incredible pricing of $ 2,000 in 2012,
half what has been typical!
PRICE DECREASE IS
DRIVING R&D DEVELOPMENTSWafer Level Packaging is confirmed as a
significant trend to further reduce detector cost and will be a strategic issue
for new players to successfully enter the market. FLIR started to use WLP in
2011, and soon other players will follow. (Raytheon, Sensonor,
NEC).
Pixel size miniaturization is a key trend to further increase the
resolution of the imager and decrease the cost of the optics. In 2012, 17µm
pixel pitch has become a standard in new product release, approaching the 12µm
physical limit.
While the size of the pixel decreases, sensitivity
of new sensors increases to approach 30mK (SCD, ULIS). That evolution will
enable to broader the microbolometer adoption to high performance applications
so far exclusively targeted by cooled IR detectors.
An increasing trend
toward multispectral imaging at end-user level has driven several microbolometer
developments. Image fusion aiming at combining several spectral bands (MWIR,
LWIR, Visible). to increase system performance and added functionalities to
thermal camera users. SCD has paved the way for dual-band imaging by releasing a
wide band imager realizing on-Chip fusion of LWIR & MWIR.
