[TrendForce View] What are the prospects of the new memory technologies?
While MRAM, SRAM, and FRAM are often being described as “new” memory technologies, these solutions have been in existence for some time but have yet to enter the mainstream market. Among the factors that drive different memory technologies into the mainstream, cost is the most critical if not the absolute. The semiconductor industry, which generates hundreds of billions in revenue, considers the cost of chips in two basic terms:
[1] The production cost of wafers
[2] The number of chips that can be produced on a wafer
The well-known Moore’s Law states that the number of transistors in a chip doubles every 18 months. However, the shrinking of the manufacturing process that allows the packing of more transistors onto a chip appears to reach a limit as the development of related technologies becomes more challenging. In 2003, Intel declared that there was a bottleneck to the scaling down of the manufacturing process to 65nm. However, Intel soon made the necessary technological breakthrough and continued to advance in die shrink. With respect to the development of NAND Flash, the introduction of 3D-NAND by Toshiba has extended the lifespan of this memory technology. Other memory makers are searching for the next breakthrough in digital storage, but their advances so far have further prolonged the lifespan of NAND Flash.
DRAMeXchange, a division of TrendForce, finds that many companies are now engaged in the R&D of new types of memory since they anticipate another future bottleneck in die shrink. The memory market is especially impacted by the limitations of the manufacturing process. However, most new technologies and materials are still in the early phase of development. It will take some time before the next-gen alternatives to DRAM and NAND Flash enter the consumer market. To be ready for mass production, proponents of respective new memory technologies must keep lowering the wafer production cost while raising the number of chips on each wafer so that these two indicators eventually cross over (i.e. achieving acceptable margin with the number of chips on the wafer).
Objectively speaking, a new storage memory technology can succeed in the market if its cost has been lowered enough to become competitive. For new but relatively less mature storage solutions, their adoption by consumers will also depend on DRAM and NAND Flash finally coming to their ultimate technological limitations. Only then, the market will be more willing to accept higher costs of the new solutions for the technological advantages that they provide.
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