The new report shows about 30 billion Internet connections are expected to be in place worldwide in 2020, with 85% of those attachments being to web-enabled “things”—meaning a wide range of commercial, industrial, and consumer systems, distributed sensors, vehicles, and other connected objects—and 15% for electronics used by humans to communicate, download and receive streams of data files, and search for online information. It was the opposite of that in 2000, with 85% of 488 million Internet connections providing human users with online access to the World Wide Web and the remaining 15% serving embedded systems, remote sensing and measurements, control, and machine-to-machine communications.
Strong double-digit increases in the Internet of Things market will drive up IC sales in IoT applications by a compound annual growth rate (CAGR) of 15.9% between 2015 and 2019 to about $19.4 billion in the final year of this decade (Figure 2), according to the new report. IoT applications will also fuel strong sales growth in optoelectronics, sensors/actuators, and discrete semiconductors (O-S-D), which are projected to rise by a CAGR of 26.0% between 2015 and 2019 to $11.6 billion in four years. The new IC Market Drivers report shows microcontrollers and system-on-chip microprocessors topping integrated circuit sales growth with a CAGR of 22.3% in the next four years, followed by memories at 19.8%, application specific standard products (ASSPs) at 16.4%, and analog ICs at an annual growth rate of 12.7%.