Market updates

Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates say that the emerging memory market will reach $20 billion in revenues by 2029, which will boost the emerging memory manufacturing equipment market to $854 million in revenues.

According to the "Emerging Memories Ramp Up" report, offered by Objective and Coughlin, the market will grow by displacing the currently used NOR flash and SRAM memories which are less efficient - and will also displace a share of the DRAM market. Emerging memories will be used both as standalone memory chips and as embedded memories within other chips (such as microcontrollers, ASICs, and even compute processors). Future process shrinks and improved economies of scale will drive down prices, which will allow emerging memories to compete more effectively against today's most popular volatile and nonvolatile technologies.

A new market report by Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates expects that stand-alone MRAM and STT-MRAM revenues will grow 170X from 2018 to 2029, reaching almost $4 billion in revenues. The growth of next-generation memory technologies will be mainly driven by displacing today’s less efficient memory technologies like NOR flash and SRAM.

The analysts expect many memory technologies, including DRAM, 3D Xpoint and NAND to grow in the coming years, but the most stellar growth will be of MRAM memories. Shipments in terms of capacity are expected to grow from around 0.1 Petabytes in 2019 to almost 1 million Petabytes by 2029.

Market analyst firm Yole Developpement presents its latest next-generation memory forecasts in an interesting new article. The company says that following more than 15 years of development, PCM is finally taking off in stand-alone applications due to strong support from Intel and Micron.

STT-MRAM is expected to lead the embedded memory race as many foundries are rushing to add MRAM support and expertise to their product lines. STT-MRAM is promising for enterprise storage SCM.

Tom Coughlin posted an interesting overview of the 2018 MRAM Developer day, which is well worth a read. Besides the conference report, Coughlin also updates on its market estimates - the market for MRAM and STT-MRAM memory solutions will experience fast growth - growing from $36 million in 2017 to about $3.3 billion in 2028. This growth will be at the expense of SRAM, NOR flash and some DRAM.

The demand for MRAM memory will result in an increased demand for MRAM production equipment, of course. MRAM equipment revenues will reach $792 million by 2028, according to Coughlin Associates.

Veeco says that it in the past quarter it has received Ion Beam Etch Solution orders from STT-MRAM developers. Veeco's systems are used for magnetic memory development, and the company is collaborating with a leading semiconductor capital equipment manufacturer in this market.

The company "continues to be encouraged by our customers interest" in the STT-MRAM market.

Yole Developpement says that the emerging Non-Volatile Memory (NVM) market is still small, generating only $53 million in sales in 2015. The market is still limited to niche markets due to the limited densities.

Yole sees the market growing very quickly, though, to reach $4.6 billion by 2021 - a CAGR of 110%. Yole says that the clear go-to market for emerging-NVM will be storage-class memory. High-capacity SCM applications will use either phase-change memory or RRAM memory, while applications that require high endurance and speed will adopt STT-MRAM memories.

A new report from Coughlin Associates says that in the near future we will see dramatic changes in the memory market as as fast non-volatile memories augment and eventually replace volatile memory.

MRAM (and STT-MRAM) annual shipping capacity will rise from 240TB in 2014 to between 15 and 35 PB in 2020. MRAM and STT-RAM revenues are expected to increase from about $300 million in 2014 to between $1.35 and $3.15 billion by 2020.

Yole Developpement released a new emerging-memory market report in which they try to asses the future of the memory market. Yose says that Phase-change memory (PCM) is pretty much dead, and the two main emerging memory technologies are MRAM and Resistive random Access Memory (ReRAM or RRAM).

While RRAM is very promising in the near future, with support from Micron (they plan to release RRAM chips in 2015) and Panasonic while other players are expected to react quickly. RRAM and STT-MRAM will compete in 2015-2016 in some standalone markets (such as embedded MCU, wearables and smart cards and the storage class memory for enterprise storage which will be the biggest market), and it's not clear yet which technology will be the most popular.

Coughlin Associates released a new report on non-volatile memory and storage technologies. The authors see MRAM and STT-MRAM replacing SRAM and DRAM within the next few years - and probably before RRAM replaces flash memory. MRAM advances quickly and this will result in lower prices which will make the technology very competitive.

Coughlin projects that MRAM and STT-MRAM annual shipping capacity will rise from an about 80 TB in 2013 to 16.5 PB in 2019. Revenues will increase from $190 million in 2013 to $2.1 billion in 2019. This will obviously require more production capacity and the MRAM manufacturing equipment market (not including the CMOS creation) will rise from $52.9 million in 2013 to $246.3 million in 2019.

Tweaktown posted an interview with Everspin's CEO, Philip LoPresti, who explains the company technology and business.

Philip says that while Everspin currently ships only 64 Mbit STT-MRAM, they have plans to increase the density up to a Gigabit within the next few years.