'Universal' memory market to hit $75 billion in 2019, says iSuppli

The market for a memory integrated circuit that combines the speed of SRAM, the density of DRAM and the non-volatility of flash, could be $76.3 billion by 2019, according to market research company iSuppli Corp.
The so-called “universal” memory would, by then, have grabbed about 80 percent of the market, the market researcher has estimated in a long-range forecast it described as “speculative.”

There is no single semiconductor memory technology today that has all the desired attributes, which on top of speed, density and non-volatility include: low-cost of manufacture, low switching energy and scalability to nanometer-scale dimension.

Products in various stages of commercialization that include at least some of the attributes include: Ovonic Unified Memory (OUM), Magneto-Resistive RAM (MRAM), Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) and Nanotube RAM (NRAM), iSuppli said. But the rewards for a winning technology are likely to be immense with the memory market set to double from $46.8 billion posted in 2004 to $95.4 billion by 2019, iSuppli said."