DRAM and NAND Flash industry six trend forecast analysis

Based on the long-term observation of the DRAM and NANDFlash industries, DRAMeXchange, an analysis department of TrendForce, has put forward the following six major trend forecasts for the industrial development in the past two decades:

Trend 1: PC-DRAM current mainstream specification DDR3 will dominate the market until 2014

The mainstream specification for PC-DRAM has been upgraded to DDR3 since 2011, and DRAMeXchange is expected to maintain its dominant position by at least 2014. Although the JEDEC organization will officially announce the DDR4 standard specification in, DRAMeXchange's conservative view on whether DDR4 can follow the history of DDR and DDR2 and replace DDR3 into the mainstream market during the period. The reason behind this is that the marginal benefits brought by DDR4 to PC performance improvement are relatively limited, but it should be noted that Intel will still have the final right to decide.

Trend 2: the maturity of TSV and 2.5D/3DIC technologies will become the key to influencing the mainstream of MobileDRAM in the future.

The mainstream particles of MobileDRAM starting in 2011 are LPDDR2Gb. The shipment of LPDDR22Gb particles is expected to grow rapidly in 2012 to replace the mainstream position of LPDDR. Mobile handheld devices demand bandwidth (BW) with the development of audio and video 3D, so that LPDDR2 can only meet the needs before 2012. The trend after 2013 has been determined to be won by LPDDR3. However, to meet BW requirements during the-period, DRAMeXchange believes that the LPDDR series and WideI/O will continue to compete. DRAMeXchange expects that the future maturity of TSV and 2.5D/3DIC technologies will play an important role in influencing the rise of WideI/O.

Trend 3: ultratek is expected to become the battlefield of confrontation between PC-DRAM and MobileDRAM in the future

In the future, with the release of Intel's next-generation platform IvyBridge and Haswell, DDR3L and LPDDR3 will be available DRAM specifications. This indicates that the Ultrabook will be the first battle of PC-DRAM and MobileDRAM in the future. The advantage of the latter is that it also supports the AOAC (Always-on-Always-Connected) and fast recovery functions required by Ultrabook, will be more power-saving than PC-DRAM, and fulfill the standby time requirements set by Ultrabook. DRAMeXchange believes that in the future, if MobileDRAM could break into the Ultrabook supply refining, the overall market size may even surpass PC-DRAM by 2015, turning it into the biggest market for DRAM applications.

Trend 4: It is expected that the unit cost of SSD will fall below one dollar in the second half of 2012, and the growth potential will emerge.

When the use of the latest process-level SSD officially enters the post-production phase in the second half of 2012, the unit cost is expected to fall below the dollar level, reaching the long-awaited sweet spot in the market. At that time, DRAMeXchange expects that the Ultrabook will change from a solution that tends to adopt HybridHDD to a PureSSD solution, and the mainstream capacity will be greatly increased to GB. It is estimated that the market share of Ultrabook will be increased rapidly in the third quarter of 2012, so that the NANDFlash consumption of SSD will also grow from 2011 in 5.1% to 15% so far, becoming among the many NANDFlash application products, one of the most explosive growth categories.

Trend 5: PC-SSD interface will be based on SATA3.0, the future is expected to upgrade to a higher speed PCIe-Like interface

In 2011 PC-SSD (PC solid state drive) used by the standard transmission interface is still dominated by SATA2.0, 2012 with the IvyBridge processor market, SATA3.0 will gradually become the mainstream interface, and pushed BW to 600 MB/s. However, as NANDFlash of the ONFI3.0 and ToggleDDR2.0 interfaces start to be in mass production in the future, it will increase the transmission speed bottleneck of SSD Products and transfer it to the control chip. This development has led SATA-IO to begin developing standards for SATAExpress * in 2011. The maximum transmission speed of SATAExpress will increase to 1000 Mb/s and 2000 MB/s. Based on historical experience, Intel is likely to support high-speed interfaces of SATAExpress or "PCIe-like" on its CPU platform in to maximize the performance of ONFI3.0 and ToggleDDR2.0.

Trend 6: competition between NANDFlash and DRAM will rapidly increase as system products move towards "affordable fashion"

Although DRAM and NANDFlash complement each other in terms of functions, the trend of low-price fashion (high value/low price) is becoming more and more popular in systems such as Ultrabook and smart phones, DRAMeXchange expects that the future competition between DRAM and NANDFlash will gradually increase. We believe that the relevant OEM/ODM companies will use resources for NANDFlash rather than DRAM under a limited budget, because this will allow consumers to clearly feel the improvement of product performance, to attract consumers' favor.

Note: SATAExpress combines the SATA software infrastructure (softwareinfrastructure) with the PCIe transmission interface.

DRAM and NAND Flash industry six trend forecast analysis