High-end inertial sensors are becoming a significant market, says Yole Developpement.

Defence accounts for 40% of the market while commercial aerospace accounts for 26% Commercial shipping has 18% share and industrial has 16%.

Defence, commercial aerospace and maritime should have between 3 and 4% CAGRs, while industrial applications look the most promising with more than 10% CAGR in the next five years.

The estimated global defense/military spending was approximately $1.8 billion.

The inertial system market has passed through different technological stages.

Initially, mechanical gyros appeared, and then optical RLGs and FOGs followed. Honeywell still dominates the market with its legacy RLG technology, while Northrop Grumman and Safran dominate the FOG market.

Other smaller FOG companies such as iXblue, KVH, Emcore are benefiting from the robotic vehicle market.

They expand their capabilities to compete against RLG in the higher-performance segment and against silicon MEMS in the lower performance segment.

KVH is chasing high-volume manufacturing with its newly-announced photonic FOG. It’s a miniaturized version of a FOG that could be used in autonomous vehicles and is already in evaluation programs.

Currently, the HRG phase is reaching maturity, thanks to interesting breakthroughs in high-volume manufacturing, especially by Safran. This may change the landscape in mid-term, and this could also potentially impact the RLG business.

MEMS has made its debut in the high-end inertial systems market.

While traditionally originating from consumer and other low-end commercial applications, silicon MEMS has a low C-SWAP. It is continuously improving and pushing FOG out of many industrial and some tactical applications that are considered high-end, at 1-10°/h in-run bias instability performance.

However, silicon MEMS gyros are still immature to expand in other applications that require bias instability below 1°/h.

Traditional players such as Honeywell, NG, Safran, and UTC are addressing MEMS technologies..