Market updates - Page 2

Yole Développement released a new report on Emerging Non-Volatile Memories (which include four major technologies: MRAM, PCM, RRAM and FeRAM). They see the market increasing ten-fold in the next five years to $2 billion by 2018 (of which STT-MRAM and PCM will take the major share of $1.6 billion) - mostly due to improved scalability and chip density.

The largest market will be enterprise storage, where STT-MRAM and PCM cache memory will be adopted. PCM will also be used in mobile phones thanks to 1GB chips made available by Micron in 2012. STT-MRAM is expected to replace SRAM in SoC applications thanks to lower power consumption and better scalability. Another market for MRAM and STT-MRAM is smart card MCUs.

Markets and Markets is set to release a new report next month (Global Next-Gen memory market 2012-2017) in which they predict that the total market for new kinds of memory technologies will only reach $90.74 million by 2017 - a CAGR of 7.3% from 2012.

The report details several technology types, including MRAM, PCRAM, Ferroelectric RAM and Memristors. Of the next generation technologies, MRAM, in 2017, will be biggest market followed by FeRAM, PCRAM & Memristors.

Everspin issued a PR today announcing a 300% growth in product shipment in 2011 - with 250 new design wins. Everspin actually revealed this information last week at CES. Everspin says that the enterprise storage, server and networking segment was the fastest growing segment during the year (Everspin's "traditinal" markets are the industrial, energy and automotive and transportation markets).

The company further revealed that a number of leading vendors in this segment are using MRAM for critical data storage in RAID systems, servers and routers. Both Dell and LSI are using Everspin's chips in their RAID controllers.

Everspin had a presentation at CES 2012, in which they gave some interesting new details. The company has shipped over 4 million MRAM chips to date, and they expect to ship over 5 million in 2012 (this is based on design wins in 2011). They have over 300 customers and over 250 design wins. Everspin further says that currently there are over 100 MRAM products on the market.

Everspin said that they see rapid growth in MRAM sales, and the company expects to sell over 3.5 million MRAM chips in 2011. The company sold their millionth MRAM chip in 3Q 2010, and since then sold another million.

Everspin expects the growth to continue at the same pace in 2012 - as they scored several new design wins.

ReportLinker has released a new report which analyzes the global Market for nano-memory in Millions of US$. The types of Nanomemory technologies discussed in the report include: Ferroelectric Random Access Memory or FRAM, Magnetoresitive Random Access Memory or MRAM, Ovonic Unified Memory, Holographic Memory, Nano-RAM or NRAM, Molecular Memory, and Polymer memory.

Annual forecasts are provided for the period of 2010 through 2015. The report profiles 40 companies including many key and niche players worldwide.

Reportlinker.com announces that a new market research report related to the Telephony industry is available in its catalogue. The report gives an in-depth analysis of mobile phone memory industry, covering nearly 300 memory models newly put on the market, including memory types, suppliers, memory capacity, etc. At the same time, the products of all mobile phone memory manufacturers get expounded as well in the report.

It includes the following sections about MRAM:

• The Structure of MRAM
• The Working Principles of MRAM
• Typical Applications of MRAM

Research and Markets has announced the addition of the Frost & Sullivan report: Advances in Embedded Memories to their offering.

In this research, Frost & Sullivan's expert analysts thoroughly examine the following technologies: embedded static random access memory (eSRAM), embedded dynamic RAM (eDRAM), embedded flash memory (eflash), magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM), ferroelectric RAM (FeRAM/FRAM), phase change memory (PCM/PRAM), carbon nanotube memory, molecular memory, polymer memory, and biomolecular memory.

Research and Markets has announced the addition of The Market For Nano-Enabled Memory and Storage - 2006 & Beyond to their offering. This report covers the markets for FRAM, MRAM, ovonic memory, nanotube memory, molecular memory, polymer memory, holographic memory, MEMS-based memory systems and other memory technologies likely to be commercialized in the next decade.

The report identifies and quantifies the opportunities presented by these technologies and the timeframes in which they will emerge. The current state of the market for each of these technologies is identified are they in R&D, sampling, pilot production, full-scale production? as are the markets for these products are to be found. The report discusses which kinds of end product would use each of these technologies and in what context do they replace DRAM, SRAM, Flash, disk storage or some combination of these? Will they create entirely new products?

n an interview for HPCwire, Professor Thomas Sterling says that MRAM is one of the most promising material expected to replace silicon for supercomputing chip production. From the interview: "The most likely replacement for silicon is silicon; and by that I mean new semiconductor materials incorporating silicon. Beyond that, my personal opinion is that the most promising technologies likely to enhance the use of advanced silicon technologies are: a) chip to chip optical interconnects, b) Wafer-scale technology, but this has to have built-in fault tolerance, otherwise low yields will kill it. c) Niobium RSFQ super-conductive technology; this is unpopular, but the power benefits at higher clock rates are significant. And d) MRAM - magnetic RAM for low power, high density storage. There is also the possibility of new packaging techniques that may greatly increase density, such as 3-D structures; but this assumes we can get the heat out. In each of these cases we have enough proof of concept experiments in laboratory tests to demonstrate their promise Using fiber optics one can deliver close to one Terabit per second rates and super-conductive material can clock at in excess of 700 GHz. RSFQ was cited in a previous ITRS report by the SIA as a potential future technology.