Hola Mirren and welcome aboard... You'll find there is no better time to buy IMO...

3D Xpoint has basically been relegated to the attic.... And left a reasonable hole in the market according to Handy et al... Over 100 companies are in the mix to find replacement technologies and 4DS is at the top of the list... And whilst I don't have the $7500 lying around to purchase the full report, I don't feel we need to... With 3D gone it leaves on ReRam & MRAM as the discrete emerging memory chips and with the demise of 3D a 20c per share purchase today may give you access to $25B of baseline revenue that 3D leaves behind.... Gotta love a garage sale now don't ya... 8tey

The 203-page report includes 142 figures and 31 tables, providing detailed forecasts for embedded memory on SoCs, discrete emerging memory chips like MRAM and ReRAM, and 3D XPoint memory.

The publisher projects that 3D XPoint Memory, with significant gigabyte shipments in 2020-2021, and with its important price advantage versus DRAM will grow to a baseline level of 90.0EB (exabytes) of shipping capacity by 2030. 3D XPoint baseline revenues are projected to reach $25.3B by 2030.

Emerging Memory Market is Finding its Direction

Emerging memories have been relegated to niches for decades, but that scenario has taken an abrupt turn. Recent market dynamic changes are suddenly opening the door to their widespread use.

Jim Handy

JUN 30, 2020

Related To:

Objective Analysis

Despite COVID-19, despite Intel’s Optane DIMM delays, despite US-China trade wars, and despite numerous other setbacks, the emerging memory market is on a path to grow significantly over the next decade.

A newly released report by Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates, “Emerging Memories Find Their Direction,” shows that emerging memories are well on their way to reach $36 billion in combined revenues by 2030. This is driven by two phenomena. The first is the fact that today’s leading embedded-memory technologies, SRAM and NOR flash, are unable to efficiently scale past 28 nm and thus will be replaced by embedded magnetoresistive RAM (MRAM) or another technology. The second is the adoption of Intel’s Optane DIMMs, officially known as the “Optane DC Persistent Memory Module,” which is poised to grab a meaningful share of the server DRAM market.

Foundries, Designers, and Memory Makers Impacted

Foundries and other companies that participate in the memory markets must pay close attention to this transition or they will be left behind. Designers and users of SoCs should be thinking right now about what ramifications nonvolatile memories will have on their designs. The changes that these new memory types will bring to power consumption and system responsiveness will fundamentally alter the way we use and profit from memory technology. Those who understand these changes will have a profound competitive advantage.

Emerging memory technologies have become extremely interesting to designers of all types of systems. Chips for artificial intelligence (AI) and the Internet of Things (IoT) are starting to embrace them as embedded memories. And larger systems are already changing their architectures to adopt emerging memories as a superior alternative to today’s standard memory technologies. This transition will challenge the industry, but it will bring significant advantages.

New Materials Need New Tools

Many of these emerging memory types require new materials and processes, driving changes to the tool complement in standard CMOS logic fabs. Those changes will create opportunities for capital equipment suppliers.

In response to this market change, the report’s forecasts find that emerging memory petabyte shipments will rise faster than other memory technologies (Fig. 1), driving revenues to grow to $36 billion. This will occur largely because these emerging memories will take over a share of established markets for today’s mainstream technologies: NOR flash, SRAM, and DRAM. New memories will replace both discrete memory chips and the embedded memories within SoCs: ASICs, microcontrollers, and even the caches in compute processors.

1. Standalone memory annual petabyte shipments show solid growth from 2018-2030. (Source: Objective Analysis & Coughlin Assoc., 2020)

The report explains how 3D XPoint memory revenues will surge to more than $25 billion by 2030, simply because the technology sells for less than the DRAM it displaces. It also explains why discrete MRAM/STT-RAM chip revenues will grow to more than $10 billion, or nearly 300X 2019’s MRAM revenues. In addition, it projects that resistive RAM (ReRAM) and MRAM will compete to replace the bulk of embedded NOR and SRAM in SoCs, fueling even greater revenue growth.

Capital Spending Must Increase

The semiconductor industry’s conversion to emerging memories will require increased capital equipment spending. The report finds that by 2030, the incremental manufacturing equipment spending required by MRAM is most likely to grow 16X its 2019 total of $44 million to almost $700 million, but it could grow as high as $1.3 billion (Fig. 2).

2. Total spending for MRAM capital equipment will grow to nearly $700 million in 2019-2030. (Source: Coughlin Associates)

Many Contenders in the Race

It’s not completely clear which memory technology will emerge as the winner in this battle, though. The report investigates phase-change memory (PCM), ReRAM, ferroelectric RAM (FRAM), MRAM, and a number of technologies that aren’t yet as mature as these, and gives each technology’s competitive strengths and weaknesses. Nearly 100 company profiles identify each participant and explain how each plans to address this market shift. These companies include chip makers, technology licensors, foundries, and tool makers, to cover every corner of the semiconductor supply chain.

The 203-page report includes 142 figures and 31 tables, providing detailed forecasts for embedded memory on SoCs, discrete emerging memory chips like MRAM and ReRAM, and 3D XPoint memory. A capital equipment forecast models the demand for new equipment to support the market’s transition from today’s to tomorrow’s memory technologies.

The report can be purchased online for immediate download at either company’s website:

• https://Objective-Analysis.com/reports/#Emerging
• https://TomCoughlin.com/tech-papers/

Jim Handy is General Director of Objective Analysis.

The memories addressed in this report include PCM, ReRAM, FRAM, MRAM, STT MRAM and a variety of less mainstream technologies such as carbon nanotubes.

Based upon the level of current development and the characteristics of these technologies, resistive RAM (ReRAM) may be a potential replacement for flash memory. However, flash memory has several generations of technologies that will be implemented before a replacement is required. Thus, this transition will not fully occur until the next decade at the earliest.

Micron and Intel’s introduction of 3D XPoint Memory, a technology that has high endurance, performance much better than NAND, although somewhat slower than DRAM, and higher density than DRAM, could impact the need for DRAM. Intel introduced NVMe SSDs with its Optane technology (using 3D XPoint) in 2017 and began to ship NVDIMM Optane products in 2019, in support of its newest generation of server processors, the Second-Generation Intel Xeon Scalable Processors. 3D XPoint uses a type of phase change technology.

Magnetic RAM (MRAM) and spin-transfer torque RAM (STT MRAM) will start to replace some NOR, SRAM and possibly DRAM within the next few years and probably before ReRAM replaces flash memory. The rate of development in STT MRAM and MRAM capabilities will gradually result in lower prices, and the attractiveness of replacing volatile memory with high speed and high endurance nonvolatile memory make these technologies very competitive, assuming that their volume increases to reduce production costs (and thus purchase prices).

Ferroelectric RAM (FRAM) and some ReRAM technologies have some niche applications and with the use of HfO FRAM the number of niche markets available for FRAM could increase.

Moving to a nonvolatile solid-state main memory and cache memory will reduce power usage directly as well as enable new power-saving modes, provide faster recovery from power off and enable more stable computer architectures that retain their state even when power is off. Eventually, spintronic technology, that uses spin rather than current for logic processes, could be used to make future microprocessors. Spin-based logic could enable very efficient in-memory processing. Several emerging memory technologies are also being used in neuromorphic computing experiments.

The use of a nonvolatile technology as an embedded memory combined with CMOS logic has great importance in the electronics industry. NOR flash reached its scaling limit at 28nm, and soon will be replaced with one of these new technologies. As a replacement for a multi-transistor SRAM, STT MRAM could reduce the number of transistors and thus provide a low cost, higher-density solution. A number of enterprise and consumer devices use MRAM, based on field switching, to act as an embedded cache memory, and this trend will continue.

The availability of STT MRAM has accelerated this trend. Because of the compatibility of MRAM and STT-RAM processes with conventional CMOS processes, these memories can be built directly on top of CMOS logic wafers. Flash memory doesn’t have the same compatibility with conventional CMOS. The power savings of nonvolatile and simpler MRAM and STT MRAM, when compared with SRAM, is significant. As MRAM $/GB costs approach those of SRAM, this replacement could cause significant market expansion.

The publisher projects that 3D XPoint Memory, with significant gigabyte shipments in 2020-2021, and with its important price advantage versus DRAM will grow to a baseline level of 90.0EB (exabytes) of shipping capacity by 2030. 3D XPoint baseline revenues are projected to reach $25.3B by 2030.

It is projected that total MRAM and STT MRAM baseline annual shipping capacity will rise from an estimated 18TB in 2019 to 315PB in 2030. Standalone MRAM and STT-RAM baseline revenues are expected to increase from $35M in 2019 to about $10B by 2030. Much of this revenue gain will be at the expense of SRAM, NOR flash and some DRAM, although STT-RAM is developing its own special place in the pantheon of shipping memory technologies.

The demand for MRAM and STT-MRAM will drive demand for capital equipment to manufacture these devices. While MRAM and STT-MRAM can be built on standard CMOS circuits supplied by large semiconductor fabricators, MRAM and STT MRAM do require specialized fabrication equipment for the MRAM layers that is similar to or the same as that used in manufacturing the magnetic read sensors in hard disk drives.

The increasing demand for nonvolatile memory-based upon MRAM and STT MRAM will cause total manufacturing equipment revenue used for making the MRAM devices to rise from an estimated $43.8M in 2019 to between $225M to $1.29B by 2030 with a baseline projected spending of $696M.

Thus, total emerging standalone memory shipments by 2030 could range from about 163.5 Exabytes to 17.2 Exabytes with a baseline value of 90.3 Exabytes. The majority of the capacity shipments are for 3D XPoint. The revenue will range between a low of about $7.6B and a high of about $64.7B in 2030 with a baseline value of about $35.6B.

• 4DS Memory
• Accretech
• Adesto Technologies
• ANELVA
• Applied Materials
• Arm
• ASM
• ASML
• Avalanche Technology
• BAE Systems
• BeSang
• Bruker
• Canon
• Canon-ANELVA
• Capital Equipment Companies
• CAPRES A/S
• CEA-Leti
• Cobham-Aeroflex
• Crocus Technology
• Crossbar
• Cypress
• EG Systems
• Everspin
• Ferroelectric Memory Company
• Fujitsu Semiconductor
• GigaDevice Semiconductor, Inc.
• GLOBALFOUNDRIES
• Grandis
• GREAT
• Hitachi High Technology
• Honeywell
• HPE
• Hprobe
• IBM
• imec
• Infineon
• Integral Solutions, Inc. (ISI)
• Intel
• Intermolecular
• Jusung Engineering
• Keysight Technologies
• Kioxia
• KLA Tencor
• Knowm
• Lake Shore
• Lam Research
• Lapis Semiconductor
• Leti
• Leuven Instruments
• MagOasis
• Micron Technology
• MicroSense
• NaMLab
• Nanomagnetics Instruments
• Nanometrics
• Nantero
• NEC
• Neoark
• Nikon
• Numem
• Nuvoton
• NVE
• NXP
• Onto Innovation
• Ovonyx
• Oxford Instruments
• Panasonic
• Plasma Therm
• Qualcomm
• Rambus
• Ramtron
• Reliance Memory
• Renesas Electronics
• ROHM
• Samsung Semiconductor
• Seagate Technology
• Semiconductor Fab Companies
• SHB
• SilTerra
• Singulus Technologies
• SK hynix
• Smart Tip
• SMIC
• Sony Corporation
• Spin Memory (formerly known as Spin Transfer Technologies)
• STMicroelectronics
• Symetrix
• TDK
• Texas Instruments
• Thin Film Electronics
• Tokyo Electron
• TowerJazz
• TSMC
• Ulvac
• UMC
• Unidym
• Veeco
• Weebit Nano
• Western Digital/SanDisk
• Winbond