New types of memory have already begun to grow and should climb to about $44 billion by 2032, according to a new report from Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates.

Current memory technologies, including flash memory (NAND and NOR), DRAM, and SRAM, although occupying the largest market share today, face potential technical limitations in continuous improvement, and have been unable to meet emerging trends such as artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and 5G. Application scenarios have higher and higher performance requirements for storage and computing.

Therefore, efforts are being made to develop new storage technologies. While these new technologies have high energy efficiency ratios, most of them use non-volatile memory technology, which can be used for long-term storage or to provide memory that does not lose information when power is not turned on. This provides advantages for battery and ambient powered equipment as well as for energy savings in data centers.

The report states that the emerging memory market will initially grow to $44 billion by replacing incumbent technologies including NOR flash, SRAM and DRAM. The new memories will replace standalone memory chips and embedded memories in microcontrollers, ASICs and even computing processors, which will then grow into new markets of their own.

"This is a semiconductor market to watch over the next decade," said Dr. Thomas Coughlin, president of Coughlin Associates. "Those who participate in this market can plan for significant growth."

Designers and users of SoCs are already incorporating these new nonvolatile memories into cutting-edge designs to achieve more competitive power consumption and system responsiveness. Those who take this approach will enjoy a huge market advantage.

"Designers of all types of systems are finding that emerging memories offer new advantages that were previously unavailable," said Jim Handy, general manager of Objective Analysis. IoT will be revolutionized as new embedded memory types reduce power consumption. Larger systems are already changing their architecture to employ persistent memory to improve latency and data integrity. "

The report explains how standalone MRAM and STT-RAM revenue will grow to about $1.4 billion, or more than 30 times standalone MRAM revenue in 2021. At the same time, embedded RRAM and MRAM will compete to replace most of the embedded NOR and SRAM in SoCs, driving greater revenue growth.

At present, the more mature technical routes in the new storage field mainly include phase change memory (PCM), magnetic change memory (MRAM), ferroelectric memory (FRAM), and resistive change memory (RRAM). PCM obtains different resistance values ​​through the change of the phase state of the phase change material, MRAM changes the resistance through the direction change of the magnetic domain/spin magnetic chip in the magnetic material, FRAM uses the "ferroelectric" effect to store data, and RRAM uses the resistance change material The creation or closure of conductive channels in the medium achieves a change in resistance.

Due to the unique random and electrical characteristics of RRAM, the PUF (physical unclonable function) technology based on RRAM can provide stronger protection for data and be used in fields such as secure storage; in addition, RRAM with high energy efficiency and low power consumption has Rich switching dynamics that can support features such as large-scale integration, low-power peripherals, and application-specific architectures for building brain-like computing chips and systems for artificial intelligence, in-memory computing, and applications designed to mimic the human brain has a significant advantage in the program, becoming a major contender for the next generation of memory.

The growth of new types of storage is by no means an overnight success. In the next few years, DRAM and NAND Flash will continue to dominate the memory chip market. However, with the rapid development of emerging fields such as 5G and artificial intelligence, strong market demand will bring strong development momentum for new storage. With the successive investment of various semiconductor manufacturers, the industrialization process of emerging memories has pressed the fast-forward button.

In the long run, memory will shape the global semiconductor industry pattern more directly. In the development of the next-generation information industry and digital economy, the basic functional role of memory is more prominent. Whoever masters the core technology of memory R&D and production will take the lead in the new round of competition in the information industry and digital economy.