The votes are in and the winner is Bosch -- and the winner is STMicroelectronics. You read it correctly. According to a recent analysis report from iHS, there was a tie this year for the top honors in the Micro Electromechanical systems (MEMS) business for 2012. This is the first time that there has ever been a tie.

Texas Instruments, which had held the number one spot, moved down two notches, taking over the number three slot. The iHS reports shows that TI’s revenue dropped by 3 percent to $751 million. This is due to the fact that chip revenue for TI’s front projectors for business and education was flat last year.

The two leaders, Robert Bosch GmbH, a multinational engineering and electronics company headquartered in Germany and STMicroelectronics, a French-Italian multinational electronics and semiconductor manufacturer located in Switzerland, both came in just shy of the $800 million mark for 2012.

Due to the fact that when converting Euros to the U.S. dollar the two companies do not use the same exchange rates every quarter, the exact dollar amount is not available. However, it appears that the difference in revenue is less than 1 percent. Both companies had revenue of about $793 million in 2012.

According to a chart produced by iHS STMicroelectronics had a major jump in revenue of about $149 million between 2011 and 2012.

Top 20 IDM and Fabless MEMS Suppliers Worldwide in Revenue (in Millions of US Dollars)

As you can see from the chart, the total revenue amounted to over $8 billion. Of that total, the top 20 MEMS manufacturers accounted for 77 percent of the industry total. The figure excludes foundry revenue in order to avoid double-counting of fabless and foundry takings within the same ranking. For instance, excluded is MEMS foundry revenue from STMicroelectronics for its fabrication of Hewlett-Packard inkjet print heads, or similar foundry revenue from Texas Instruments for Lexmark inkjet print heads.

“With billions of dollars up for grabs, competition in the MEMS market is intense. Nowhere is the rivalry more furious than the battle for the market’s top spot. In fact, the content for number one is so closely contested that Bosch and STMicroelectronics battled each other to a draw in 2012.” These were the comments of Jérémie Bouchaud, director and senior principal analyst for MEMS & sensors at IHS.

Bosch is unchallenged as the top automotive MEMS supplier. It has a 27 percent share of the market. STMicroelectronics leads in consumer and mobile MEMS. It has a 32 percent share of that market. Both companies showed a significant rise in revenue in 2012.

Outside of the Top 5 was California-based InvenSense. It came in at number 13, with revenue up 30 percent to $186 million. InvenSense is the most successful MEMS startup ever. Thanks to its design in the Nintendo Wii Motion Plus gaming accessory, its market breakthrough came in 2009.

You can read more details about the iHS report by going to MEMS Competitive Analysis Report.