Market updates

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.

While STT-MRAM is expected to lead the embedded memory race, Yole says that Stand-alone RRAM will try to catch market share to PCM on SCM application. RRAM was actually expected to be the first stand-alone technology to compete with 3D XPoint, but it has suffered repeated delays due to technical challenges. Yole expects RRAM to "return to the race for SCM" after 2020, and possibly start competing with NAND for mass storage applications.

Yole Developpement says that emerging Non-Volatile Memories (NVM) will generate $53 million in sales in 2015, but the market will grow quickly to $4.6 billion 2021. That's a CAGR of 110%!

The market is still limited to niche markets due to the limited densities, but this will change in the near future, and 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.

In October 2015 SanDisk announced a partnership with HP to co-develop RRAM technologies, enhance SanDisk's RRAM tech with HP's memristor technologies. Eventually, SanDisk will provide its RRAM memory tech to HP that will embed it in its products.

According to SanDisk's enterprise storage manager and senior VP, John Scaramuzzo, SanDisk expects the first RRAM chips to appear in enterprise storage products in 2018. The company expects RRAM to "revolutionize" storage storage architectures once it gets productized.