Market forecasts on emerging non-volatile memory business (in units, US$, number of wafers, applications, technologies - FRAM, MRAM/STTRAM, PCM, RRAM)
Understanding of the emerging non-volatile memory applications for five applications fields (Industrial & Transportation, Smart Card, Enterprise Storage, Mobile Phones, and Mass Storage). This report describes why and how emerging NVM (FRAM, MRAM/STTMRAM, PCM, RRAM) will be increasingly used in various markets: Industrial & Transportation, Enterprise Storage, Smart Card, Mobiles Phones and Mass Storage.
Until recently, only FRAM, PCM and MRAM were industrially produced and available in low-density chips to only a few players. Thus the market was quite limited and considerably smaller than the volatile DRAM and non-volatile Flash NAND dominant memory markets (which enjoyed combined revenues of $50B +in 2012).
Emerging NVM enter niche memory markets; expected to reach $ 2B by 2018. Will NVM eventually replace DRAM and NAND?
However, in the next five years the scalability and chip density of those memories will be greatly improved and will spark many new applications, with the following NVM market drivers explained in detail in this report: With the adoption of STT MRAM and PCMCache Memory, Enterprise Storage will be the largest Non-Volatile Memory market (http://www.bharatbook.com) . NVM will greatly improve the input/output performance of enterprise storage systems whose requirements will intensify with the growing need for web-based data supported by cloud servers.
Mobile Phones will increase its adoption of PCM as a substitute to flash NOR memory in MCP packages thanks to 1GB chips made available by Micron in 2012. Higher-density chips, expected in 2015, will allow access to smart phone applications that are quickly replacing entry-level phones. STTMRAM is expected to replace SRAM in SoC applications thanks to lower power consumption and better scalability. Smart card MCU (microcontrollers) will likely adopt MRAM/STTMRAM and PCM as a substitute to embedded flash. Indeed, flash memory cell-size reduction is limited for the future. NVM could reduce the cell size by 50% and thus be more cost-competitive. Additional features like increased security, lower power consumption and higher endurance are also appealing NVM attributes.
Mass storage markets served by flash NAND could begin using 3D RRAM in 2017-2018, when 3D NAND will slow down its scalability as predicted by all of the main memory players. When this happens, a massive RRAM ramp-up will commence in the next decade that will replace NAND, if sufficient 3D RRAM cost-competiveness and chip density are available. Overall, the global emerging non-volatile memory market will grow from $209M in 2012 to $2B in 2018, equating to an impressive growth of + 46 %/year. Nevertheless, this is a forecast based on a conservative scenario, and the report also provides a best-case scenario for an even broader adoption of NVM.