Market Trends of Memory Industry
This section covers the major market trends shaping the Memory Market according to our research experts:
Consumer Products is Expected to Hold Significant Market Share
The emerging memory technologies have enhanced the potential of memory by allowing the storage of more data at a lesser cost than the expensive-to-build silicon chips used by popular consumer electronic gadgets, including digital cameras, cell phones, notebooks, etc.
Taiwan's United Microelectronics Corporation (UMC), a global semiconductor foundry, is providing embedded non-volatile STT-MRAM blocks based on a 28nm CMOS manufacturing process, which will enable customers to integrate low latency, very high performance, and low power embedded MRAM memory blocks into MCUs and SoCs, targeting the Internet of Things, wearable, and the consumer electronics sector.
The technological advancements in the field are driving the demand for the market studied. Companies like Nanterohave developed high-density non-volatile memory called NRAM, which is incredibly fast, offer huge amounts of storage in a small space, and consumes very little power. With Nantero'sNRAM, consumer electronics vendors can develop new consumer devices that are considered to be futuristic. With such developments, the adoption of non-volatile memory is expected to grow.
The emerging memory technologies in the sector are mainly driven by wearable and connected devices that are expected to grow at a faster pace during the forecast period. Cisco Systems estimates that the number of connected wearable devices worldwide could reach 1,105 million units by 2022.
The demand for these memory technologies is further expected to rise owing to the effective memory requirement for other consumer electronics devices such as digital cameras, smartphones, gaming devices, etc. Ericsson estimates that the shipment of smartphone units could reach 1574.4 million by 2022.
The Americas Account for the Largest Market Share
Rapidly changing technologies and high data generation across industries are creating a need for more efficient processing systems in the country. With the advent of mobile and low-power devices, as well as high-end data centers and large on-chip caches, another high-priority demand has emerged: non-volatile, dense, and low-energy-consuming memories.
In memory semiconductor manufacturing technology, the United States has regained its competitiveness in DRAM and 3D-NAND in the last few years, and US companies are fully embracing EUV (Extreme Ultraviolet).
According to the US Department of Energy, there are about 3 million data centers in the United States. The data center has become the new unit of computing. DPUs (Data Processing Units) are the essential elements of secure and modern accelerated data centers in which GPUs, CPUs, and DPUs are able to combine into a single computing unit that is fully programmable. Nvidia estimates that data management drains up to 30% of the central processing cores in data centers. The increasing demand for data centers is also boosting the demand for memory components. Currently, large data center projects in North America have contributed to the strong demand for memory, such as DRAM.
Furthermore, It is expected that 5G will enable the transmission of a huge amount of telecommunications data in a short time, which also means devices would need more storage. This would increase the adoption of NAND flash.
The US is a major market for factory automation and industrial control. FRAM offers fast random access, high read and write endurance, and low power consumption. In factory automation, the industry-standard architecture, interface, features, and packages can enable a simple drop-in solution that can eliminate the costly re-designs of the system.
