Transparency Market Research: Global smart sensor market is expected to reach $6.9 billion in 2018

As the amount of data increases, the market for smart sensors with integrated processors will become an important development direction in the future. According to market research firm Transparency Market Research, the sales of such smart sensors may increase by 10% per year and is expected to reach US$6.9 billion by 2018.
Unlike traditional "dumb" processors that simply collect data and send it to a central server for analysis, smart sensors with integrated processors will be more powerful and intelligent. These devices can not only monitor the quality of information, but also perform advanced calculations, providing a foundation for more applications in the future.
"I think this is going to be a huge market, and all sensors are going to work in this way," said Kris Pister, Linear's chief technology officer. "The phone and apps are a good analogy. Ten years ago, nobody knew what apps were."
"It's the foundation for smart cities, smart buildings, smart waters," said Susan Eustice of WinterGreen Research, a market research firm. "It can form the Internet of Things, which is growing at an incredible rate."
It is reported that many mainstream IT manufacturers have entered the smart sensor market. Linear Technology's new sensor products equipped with 32-bit processors based on ARM technology are about to be fully put into production, while companies such as IBM, Freescale, Qualcomm, Silver Spring Network, Sensus and Streetline are also designing more powerful processors and sensors.
The rapid rise of smart sensors stems from people's huge demand for information classification. "We are swimming in a sea of ​​sensors and are drowned by massive amounts of data," said Dharmendra Modha, a researcher at IBM. "Sensor data is growing at a rapid rate, which greatly limits our ability to use data." The new smart sensors can quickly distinguish important data from useless information before transmitting data to the central server.
At the same time, in order to better apply to various terminal products, the size of smart sensors is also shrinking, and some are even as small as a pinhead. WinterGreen has made a promising prediction for the future development of smart sensors: the number of smart sensors with integrated processors will reach 2.8 trillion in 2019, far higher than the 65 million in 2013.