Leading IoT Sensor Manufacturers in 2024: Market Trends News, Analysis & More

Editor's Note: This blog was originally published on October 10, 2019. It has since been updated for accuracy and relevancy.

Connectivity is becoming an essential aspect of evolving technology in the modern world. This encompasses a growing volume of data, wireless and wired protocols, and combinations within a single use case or location. In general, connectivity is the ability to connect systems or application programs.

The Internet of Things (IoT) is a large part of growing connectivity demands within technological advancements. IoT describes “devices with sensors, processing ability, software and other technologies that connect and exchange data with other devices and systems over the Internet or other communications network.”  

The use of IoT sensors is rising and is expected to grow over the coming years with the popularity of artificial intelligence (AI) and automation. The global IoT sensors market is expected to reach “$141.80 billion by 2030 from $12.37 billion in 2020, growing at a CAGR of 28.1% from 2021 to 2030.”

Sensors play a vital role in creating IoT technology solutions, helping detect external information and replacing it with signal data that humans and machines can quickly distinguish. These sensors can collect data in many situations within various fields, such as healthcare, transportation, agriculture, disaster prevention, and infrastructure. Due to the variety of uses, it is no surprise that its growing applicable uses have led to increased demand by numerous original equipment manufacturers (OEMs), contract manufacturers (CMs), and electronic manufacturing service (EMS) providers.

The electronic component sourcing experts at Sourcengine have compiled updates and sales information for IoT sensor manufacturers across the globe. Below are ten leading manufacturers of IoT sensors and their services within the market.  

Table of Contents
1. Texas Instruments  
2. STMicroelectronics  
3. Omron
4. TE Connectivity  
5. NXP Semiconductor N.V.
6. Broadcom Limited  
7. Robert Bosch GmbH
8. Infineon Technologies AG
9. Analog Devices Inc  
10. Schneider Electric SE

Dallas-based Texas Instruments (TI), a significant player in the semiconductor industry, continues to find new and innovative solutions within IoT sensors and services. Specifically, autonomous robots are “intelligent machines that sense and navigate without human control or intervention” to help automate different societal functions. Robots and other automated functions need multiple sensing modalities to improve efficiency, productivity, and performance.  

TI details that its sensors provide accurate and reliable monitoring, protection, and control to help users develop products within various applications. With a long history of producing discrete, integrated solutions that offer users high precision, low response times, and high reliability, these sensors can be easily installed in many products to provide advanced monitoring quickly.  

Applications

• Building and Home Automation: TI sensors can help reduce energy and maintenance costs through nano power, power management, and wireless connectivity devices that address challenges in smart home applications such as HVAC and predictive maintenance.  
• Smart Cities: With IoT-related designs, these components can help reduce cost and resource consumption with long-range connectivity and centralized and integrated system control through electricity, gas, water, and waste meters.  
• Smart Manufacturing: Industrial projects require secure and robust solutions. These sensors help enable more intelligent, safer, and more efficient factory environments through position and proximity sensors, among other solutions.  
• Automotive: Through its automotive sensors, TI components can offer powertrain temperature sensors for self-calibration, accuracy, sensitivity, and resolution.  
• Wearables: The ultra-low power solutions within TI’s wearables provide accurate data collection for activity, fitness, and GPS navigation.  
• Healthcare: TI’s sensors can help improve the quality and accessibility of data collection through multiparameter patient monitoring systems.  
• Agriculture: Off-highway vehicle sensors can measure temperature, flow, level, pressure, distance, and more for more precise performance and increased efficiency for agriculture, construction, and material-handling equipment.    

With over 30 years of continuous investment and experience, STMicroelectronics has a diverse product portfolio of embedded processing capabilities for AI, connectivity, cloud computing, and more. STMicroelectronics is dedicated to playing a pivotal role in developing technology that helps solve environmental and social challenges worldwide.  

With the growing use of consumer electronics in modern life, prioritization of energy efficiency, and increasing demand for smart tools, device connectivity is a highly coveted solution necessary for advancing technology. STMicroelectronics is leading with its IoT solutions to improve processing across machines and how they are integrated within their specific environments.    

Applications

• Smart Home and City: These solutions provide flexibility in the continually evolving home and cityscape to improve energy efficiency, security, and user customization.
• Smart Things: Most consumer electronics, from remote controllers to sports watches, are growing more connected. Smart things can sense, monitor, and react to their environment. STMicroelectronics sensors provide low-cost, low-power, and innovative sensors that can be utilized in large-scale deployment of new smart things that are compact, secure, and cost-effective.  
• Smart Industry: STMicroelectronics offers smart sensor nodes for vibration and temperature monitoring, ultrasound detection, and other sensing applications that are reliable and stable as they have been tailored for industrial equipment solutions. These sensors are optimal in automation and other smart industry applications for factory floors.  
• Tags and Tracking Devices: Personal objects, including smartphones, car keys, laptops, and headphones, are becoming more connected. STMicroelectronics sensors help monitor environmental conditions such as noise, humidity, and temperature to track movement, health, and safety.  ‍

Omron Corporation is a leading manufacturer of factory automation solutions, electronic components, and automotive equipment. Beginning operations in 1933, Omron’s diverse portfolio offers a broad spectrum of sensors like proximity, infrared, rotary, linear, and temperature sensors. These products apply to industrial automation, social systems, mechanical components, and the healthcare industry.

Omron’s environmental sensors can precisely sense various ecological information with high accuracy and efficiency, such as earthquake detection based on vibrational acceleration or room air quality.

Applications

• Agriculture: With environmental tracking, Omron sensors can help increase agriculture yield through environmental detection to indicate optimal watering, weeding, pesticide spraying, and harvesting periods.  
• Energy Infrastructure: With accurate weather sensing data, environmental sensors can help predict power generation through photovoltaic, wind, and other renewable technologies. Furthermore, these products can help optimize energy efficiency and alert users to maintenance.  
• Smart Cities: Vehicle sensors can help optimize city transportation through improved advanced driver assistance systems (ADAS) that reduce congestion and accidents. Implementation of weather systems can provide residents with predictive alerts to natural disasters and the safest evacuation routes.  
• Other Applications: Omron environmental sensors and IoT applications can be used in various scenarios, including retail, sports parks, and construction sites.  

This Swiss-based company strives for innovative IoT solutions that can be utilized in various markets and industry settings. TE Connectivity sensors are offered in miniaturized packages, multi-sensor modules, ultra-low power designs, and harsh environments. These reliable and accurate sensors provide a litany of data for engineers to help improve product designs in everything from motor bearings to patient care.  

Applications

• Internet of Medical Things (IoMT): These TE Connectivity sensors can be used in medical assemblies, cardiovascular monitoring, home healthcare, and surgical and delivery applications that create a basis for control activities leading to more accurate diagnosis and treatment.  
• Industry 4.0 and Industrial Internet of Things (IIoT): Smart factory sensors from TE Connectivity can help floor staff monitor levels in harsh environments, predict failure and robotic automation maintenance, and expand the reach of various equipment along a production line. Such sensors can monitor bearing vibration, temperature, equipment performance, liquid level, and more to reduce cost and keep production running.  

Dutch semiconductor manufacturer NXP continues to push for scalable AI solutions and development through continued collaboration with its partners and experienced engineers. NXP’s IoT Sensing Software Development Kit (ISSDK) is its premier embedded software framework for the NXP Sensor Toolbox, enabling its digital and analog sensors platforms for IoT applications.  

ISSDK provides users with a unified set of sensor support models across “a broad range of NXP’s Arm Cortex-M cores based microcontrollers” to enhance performance and efficiency for several industries.

Applications

• Automotive: NXP sensors provide robust and safe solutions in-vehicle technology to optimize driving efficiency and deliver high-performance, adaptive vehicle features. These solutions include software-defined vehicle infrastructure, electrification and powertrain, ADAS, infotainment systems, vehicle control, connectivity, and automotive security and functional safety.  
• Mobile: Portable devices, wearables, and other accessories are developed with smart sensors to monitor user experience and health accurately, optimize energy use, and provide designers with information to streamline their products further.  
• Smart City: NXP continues to enable technology within smart cities to help reduce energy consumption, optimize the fuel economy within transportation, and provide accurate signage to alert citizens of weather, natural disasters, or other disruptions.  
• Communication Infrastructure: Offering the necessary solutions to keep up with the evolution of next-generation designs, NXP utilizes scalable and highly integrated solutions for home and enterprise wireless equipment.  
• Industrial: NXP IoT sensor applications help enable industrial automation at all factory levels through fast connectivity and flexible design. Sensors can help with building control through lighting, HVAC, safety systems, energy and power monitoring, and distribution.  
• Smart Home: These technologies can help users better control smart appliances through image and acoustic sensors for face or voice control with the agility to be adapted to different lifestyles.  

Semiconductor manufacturer Broadcom Limited is a leader in global infrastructure technology with over 60 years of engineering excellence and collaboration. With a focus on connectivity, Broadcom works alongside industry and engineering leadership to create technology that sets the pace of the future.  

Broadcom offers end-to-end monitoring across various IoT ecosystems comprising devices, APIs, networks, and infrastructures. These technologies provide users with immediate insight into performance across most modern platforms to pinpoint issues quickly before they become noticeable problems.  

Applications

• Industry and Automotive: Broadcom optical sensors can help improve automation solutions for robotics used in manufacturing by providing connectivity solutions with unmatched performance and reliability. These optical sensors can be applied to automotive and medical systems for accurate imaging and monitoring.  

German technology leader, Robert Bosch GmbH, knows that in the modern era, you must enable your business and products with IoT solutions as the ability to connect “things” becomes more crucial to future-oriented product development. IoT helps optimize processes, increase quality, and enables organizations to understand customer needs in real-time so companies can improve their services.  

Bosch seeks to provide companies with connected products and services so they may receive continuous data-driven insights to improve their unique business designs further. Bosch’s IoT products can be used in various markets for the creation of flexible, safe, and future-proof designs.  

Applications

• Automotive: Electric vehicles (EVs) need to prioritize energy efficiency without overstressing the power grid they feed from. Bosch provides intelligent energy management through connected controls with systems that protect against overload and provide coordination through EV charging.  
• Smart City: Growing use of EVs in cities often taxes old power grids, so Bosch products are helping provide reliable energy monitoring, generation, and consumption to strengthen energy infrastructure within cities. Similarly, ground sensors help monitor and optimize parking within structures to lower vehicle congestion.  
• Agriculture: Bosch solutions help streamline harvesting procedures through meteorological data and soil and water monitoring to alert users to peak harvest times to increase farm yields and reduce resource waste.  
• HVAC: The number of consumer electronics continues to increase, impacting the workload for HVAC systems. Device connectivity helps users manage HVAC systems from a distance via alerts.  ‍

Infineon Technologies is a leader in power systems and IoT, with smart, energy-efficient, and secure solutions that have become indispensable in many industry markets. Infineon offers an interactive sensor selection tool for companies to help understand which design will work for a particular application.  

Infineon’s XENSIV family of sensors was developed to help solve the challenges within automotive, industrial, and consumer applications. XENSIV includes magnetic, current, pressure, acoustic, 3D imaging, and radar sensors to enable “things” to see, hear, feel, and understand their environment and improve future designs and applications.  

Applications

• Automotive: The XENSIV product portfolio includes sensors that can help improve vehicle functions relating to automotive powertrains, safety, and body and comfort. Infineon’s sensors can help provide solutions for autonomous driver assistance applications.  
• Industrial: XENSIV sensors can be used in industrial robotics for smarter automation and drivers for better user control.  
• Consumer: E-bikes, wearables, lighting, and other white goods are a few of the dozens of devices that can be further improved with XENSIV sensor solutions.  

Massachusetts-based Analog Devices Inc. enjoys a strong presence in power management and signal processing applications. The company’s willingness to collaborate with related technologies is crucial to its accelerated growth. With a focus on bringing more intelligence to data-driven insights, Analog Devices ensures its products collect relevant, accurate, and complete data.  

Analog Devices always aims to enhance the capabilities of its IoT solutions by creating products that sense, measure, and interpret in ways that add intelligence and improve process optimization. The company’s high-performance portfolio of sensors boasts precision, power efficiency, and robustness for all applications.  

Applications

• Smart Health: Optical and motion sensors combined with other technologies are helping push the boundaries in uncovering new areas of study for healthcare professionals to learn more about the human body.  
• Smart Cities: Through advanced environmental and imaging sensors, new benefits are uncovered to help with power efficiency and local decision-making. Collected data can help enhance security, asset tracking, real-time monitoring, gesture recognition, and more.  
• Smart Infrastructure: Analog Devices offers sensing and connectivity solutions that monitor assets in industrial environments, remote field locations, or in transit with the most accurate and reliable information.  
• Smart Agriculture: Sensors can deliver precise measurement and geolocation to enable real-time autonomous decision-making, resource efficiency, and streamlined operations that empower farm tech without wasting assets.  
• Smart Factories: Precision sensing is aiding users in monitor control and communication with industrial robotics to improve manufacturing production lines. These solutions meet users’ needs for responsive, safer, and more flexible manufacturing applications.  ‍

Schneider Electric SE is a leading energy provider and electrical equipment and electronic components manufacturer. Established in 1836, Schneider offers automotive, automation, healthcare, hospitality, mining, and other industry solutions. Schneider is committed to making the world more environmentally friendly through seamless technology integrations.

Working toward a more sustainable and connected world, Schneider prioritizes digital transformation through its world-leading processes and energy technologies.  

Applications

• Industry: Pressure, proximity, presence, and limit switches can help improve the effectiveness of factory floor industrial robotics while increasing the safety of human staff.  
• Automotive: Committed to safety and reliability, Schneider works to provide a resilient, efficient, and sustainable e-mobility structure that boasts connectivity for ease of use among operators, homeowners, and EV drivers.  
• Smart Cities and Energy: Schneider’s sensors can help further sustainability goals by monitoring meteorological changes for renewable energy production or consumption, taking the strain off city power grids.  

About Sourcengine

Depending on the requirements needed, demand varies between every OEM, CM, and EMS provider on what they need from an IoT sensor. No solution is a one-size-fits-all, and each original component manufacturer (OCM) specializes in different areas to present quality solutions in their market niche. To create and maintain the best IoT system that improves product design or accessibility, companies need access to a variety of component offers.  

Sourcengine, the leading e-commerce site for electronic components, can help procurement teams discover the best part offers available on-site in terms of lead time and availability. Furthermore, Sourceability, Sourcengine’s parent company, can help get your connected device to market faster with help from its field application engineers (FAE) and Surcle services.  

Obtain full access to parametric data for over 1 billion components on the marketplace or send an RFQ to get in touch with Sourcengine’s team of experts to get your custom part offer.