A recent JEDEC newsletter provided information that “mobile technologies are about to replace their PC equivalents as the center of gravity in the IT market,” based on raw semiconductor sales. The author reported that components supporting mobile applications—which include baseband chips, applications processors, and mobile memory—are likely to “become the underpinning for the complete mainstream market over time. Eventually these low-powered technologies will be produced in enough volume to become viable components in a whole range of products which today would probably attract high-powered PC silicon instead.” The author concluded that as the volume of these technologies supporting mobile applications increased, the higher levels of manufacturing efficiencies of these newer technologies would result in these technologies eventually becoming “…the underpinning for the complete mainstream market over time.”
Data from another recent article pointed to the revenue of mobile memory products increasing 26 percent in 2011 to over $16 billion, which also complimented an additional source projecting that server-use DRAM, mobile DRAM, and other memory used in non-PC applications will contribute more than 50% to the total DRAM bit demand in the second half of 2012. Data provided to our clients from our own internal studies had projected an even higher ratio of mobile product acceptance in emerging countries where mobile products are in high demand.
With PCs now less than 50% of the worldwide semiconductor content, we are clearly leaving the PC era. The recent announcement that Hewlett Packard would exit both the PC and tablet computer markets should have erased any remaining doubt.
HP’s acquisition of Compaq Computers was announced in early September 2001—almost exactly 10 years ago. The companies issued a joint statement at that time claiming the acquisition was a “decisive move” that would provide “significant cost structure improvements.” The announcement noted that the combined company would have annual sales of $87.4 billion—roughly equivalent to the IBM of that period.
This more recent reminder of the transition out of the PC era is not news to corporate technology strategists of memory companies who, if anything, have been ahead of the curve of this market transition.
As we have previously noted, the past decade of very broad research of nonvolatile memory technological alternatives supporting mobile and lower power alternatives appears to be shifting from the pure research phase and into the process development phase. The entire movement toward lowering the power consumption in high-performance server applications by substituting nonvolatile memory technologies and NAND SSD architectures has propelled those technologies into potentially high volume applications, and the field of non-volatile memory technologies being considered for mobile applications continues to expand.
Other advances in the usage of memory technologies outside of main memory for desktop PCs extends to SSD’s as well as new end-product concepts based on leading edge, multi-die packaging concepts.
We have published several reports describing the design flexibility and technology progression path of several high-volume applications that will benefit from development trends in multi-die packaging configurations. Memory companies are very familiar with these trends from their earlier—and much simpler—versions of “multi-die” configurations from the historic evolution of high-volume memory modules. It is therefore not surprising to find memory companies on the leading edge of extending that concept to stacking bare die. Samsung and other memory companies continue to develop innovative packaging concepts. Samsung’s recently announced low-energy 30nm DDR3 memory module using a 3D through-silicon via (TSV) technology RDIMM represents advanced capabilities for a new generation of high-speed, high-capacity servers.
Micron’s eMLC NAND, a much higher endurance version of NAND, is another of the increasing options available for lower power applications.
OEMs are also supporting a wider range of interfaces than in the previous PC dominated era, particularly low power configurations. Another configuration that continues to find growing support is low-latency DRAM, as seen by Micron’s recently announced next-generation product as well as by GSI’s entry into that market.
These events are consistent with the theme we have maintained that the target application for new technologies has shifted away from PCs, toward a wider set of applications. It is easy to recognize that none of the new and emerging memory technologies has targeted the primary memory for PCs as their market entry application. It still needs to be pointed out, however, that the broader set of performance attributes being accepted completely invalidates the typical (and erroneous) retort that ‘no new memory can achieve high volume production until it can compete with the cost-per-bit of PC-oriented DRAM.’
Of all the technologies generally associated in the past with PC-era ICs, it remains our contention that the memory companies are the best-positioned and therefore the most likely to benefit from this transition to a broader set of target applications.
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