Flash Memory Components 2016 Market Revenues Improved to $37B, 3D NAND
awakes, XPoint Delayed
Monterey, CA - March 29, 2017 – Not since 2000, have the
memory suppliers been in an undersupply situation since 2H 2016 is increasing
memory prices for a number of reasons. NAND
vendors are producing 2D (planar) NAND at full capacity, while concurrently
making the costly shift in production to 3D NAND. DRAM has been so hot that the
Big Three (Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron) are shrinking their lithography below
1x and 1y, while maintaining their production at capacity. Other foundries,
like the memory manufacturers, are also running at capacity, trying to maintain
balance with IoT, M-2-M, mobile and computing demands. Even the NOR Flash
market saw a reversal of 15+ years of market declines has been caught in the
allocation/shortage scenario. Yet, with all this current production building
additional capacity takes time and has been fraught with technology hurdles
that slowdown bit increases.
Although the NOR market is around 5% of NAND, NOR’s
challenges represent a microcosm of the larger Flash and memory markets. With the stronger demand for SoC (System on
Chip) to satisfy the IoT and edge terminal requirements, foundries and ODMs are
shifting their wafer mix away from standalone memories. These SoCs are also
being built at lithography nodes below 40nm, where most embedded NOR Flash
cannot be built. Consequently, these SoCs will need KGD and standalone serial
NOR components at 512Kbit-256Mbit densities and larger to fulfill the IoT
system memory requirements. In China, GigaDevice who supplies serial NOR is
caught in a wafer allocation squeeze in not getting enough serial Flash wafers from
their foundry who is making more SoCs (that need serial NOR). Winbond who makes
both DRAM and NOR/NAND has been riding the higher price DRAM wave and has
limited any additional wafer allocations to NOR. Micron has been rumored to
have shut down NOR production at their Singapore fab in favor of NAND, which
removes some NOR wafer capacity. Cypress the NOR market leader is gradually
moving their emphasis from commodity standalone NOR to a IoT systems memory
module especially for the automotive market.
Finally, Macronix has regained more NOR market presence in allocating
more NOR wafer production is still facing long lead times since demand is ever
increasing on the constrained industry supply. The net effect is NOR and other
memory prices are increasing with supply constraints and vendors are on
allocation for the foreseeable future.
In consolidating its annual results of each Flash memory
vendor’s shipments, WebFeet Research found the 2016 Flash memory market to be $36.8
billion, an increase of 10% from 2015. A
substantial increase in 2016 revenues came from the NAND Flash market with a 10.7%
growth rate, while the NOR market contracted flatly from 2015 by only -1.8 %. Samsung
was the perennial 2016 revenue market leader for all NV Memories and NAND, Cypress
(Spansion) established itself as the NOR Flash and the NVRAM market leader, while
Macronix regained the serial NOR leadership position.
The 2016 Non Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor report
discusses the impact of the mergers and acquisitions on the memory market, qualifies
the migration of planar to 3D NAND, quantifies how fast the emerging NVM are
growing including STT-MRAM and XPoint as well as the reemergence of RRAM and NRAM,
and presents two forecasts for serial EEPROM showing the impact (slow initial
adoption) of the Internet of Things (IoT) and its aggressive scenario.
This 2016 Non Volatile Memory Market Shares by Vendor
report, CS700MS-2017, includes market shares by vendor for total Non Volatile
Memory, NAND Flash, NOR Flash, serial NOR Flash, total EEPROM, serial EEPROM,
parallel EEPROM, OTP ROM (EPROM and Mask ROM), and NVRAM (NVSRAM, RTC, MRAM,
FeRAM, PCM, XPoint, RRAM, NRAM and Others).
Annual revenue forecasts are provided from 2015-2022 for the EEPROM, OTP
ROM, and NVRAM markets. In addition, the NVSRAM market shares are broken out by
vendor for Real Time Clocks (RTC) and NVSRAM from 2011-2016. This report, CS700MS-2017, is available for
$2.5K and for providers of the market share data they can obtain the report
with a $500 discount. WebFeet Research also
has forecast the serial EEPROM (conservative and aggressive) and the NVSRAM
(nvSRAM, RTC) from 2014-2022 by density for revenue, units, and ASPs, and for
the serial EEPROM by interface type.
Each of these additional forecasts are priced at $500 and come in excel
format.
WebFeet Research, located in Monterey, California, provides business
consulting and market research services in the memory and storage markets, with
emphasis on flash memory components, EFDs, SSDs, Persistent Memory and In-Memory
Computing/Cognitive Computing.
Contact: WebFeet
Research at 831-869-8274 or alan.niebel@web-feetresearch.com
or www.WebFeetresearch.com
