Semiconductor memory: a smart choice for smartphones

The demand for electronic systems such as mobile communications, networking, digital consumer electronics, medical or industrial electronics, and automotive electronics has also significantly risen in the recent times, consequently increasing the need for semiconductors.

All digital consumer electronic products are extensively equipped with highly advanced semiconductor memory devices that enhance the system storage and performance. These materials are subsequently growing in importance owing to the fact that they provide the industries some new manufacturing opportunities to develop highly effective products for the users.

Besides, the demand for high speed network and connection is progressively accelerating while driving the architecture of some of the next generation memory technologies. As a result, memory devices and architectures are observing massive transformation in order to suffice the demand for optimised performance electronics, thus necessitating the need for semiconductor memory.

Semiconductor memory: a smart choice for upcoming smartphones

Given that consumer electronics have a major stake in the semiconductor memory business, smartphones have gained immense popularity on the same. Numerous studies have reported that there are over more than 3.5 billion smartphone users all across the globe as of now.

Storage performance on smartphones is likely to enhance the end-user experience in the upcoming years, with its influence anticipated to foster given the emergence of wireless technologies. This significantly testifies the fact that growing count of smartphones is likely to fuel the remuneration potential of semiconductor memory industry.

With the smartphone memory vertical witnessing tremendous developments over the past few years, the era of flash memory in the smartphones has just begun. Owing to its ability to draw less power and robust performance, flash memory has found application across the android smartphones. For various Android smartphones, the varying flash memory considerably enhances the device’s overall performance, typically between 100-300% across vivid applications.

Considering the momentum and craze for flash memory, various smartphone manufacturers have been vivaciously engaged in the development of improving their phone’s storage manifolds. A vital testament affirming the same is provided by Samsung’s recent announcement of the mass production of industry’s first ever 1TB embedded Universal Flash Storage.

The new Universal Flash Storage is endorsed by Samsung’s fifth generation V-NAND and would potentially provide 20 times more storage than a 64GB internal memory and 10 times the speed of a general microSD card for vivid data-intensive applications.

Not only this, the company is also looking into the possibilities of expanding its DRAM opportunities in the smartphone memory market. A most common DRAM used in smartphones is the LPDDR2 which consumes a comparatively lower power. Companies operating in the field of DRAM memory chips have been taking steps to gain a competitive edge over the rivals.

Say for example, China based semiconductor giant, Tsinghua Unigroup, that is a major manufacturer of flash memory, is currently involved in the production of DRAM by building a DRAM plant in Nanjing and is in talking terms with government of Chongqing for the development of the second facility. Apparently, this move would bring about a revolutionary transformation in the semiconductor memory market across the China.

Will China emerge as a lucrative ground for stakeholders in the upcoming years?

China is a home to over more than 1.3 billion mobile subscribers. This rising proportion of mobile phone users and expanding consumer electronic sector across China are expected to provide an impetus to semiconductor memory market growth.

Additionally, the region portrays a steady infrastructure growth and builds developing embedded technology which offers both the software and hardware solutions. Also, the emerging smartphone applications and rising demand for storage memory across the region would foster various firms to come up with advance memory solutions, expediting China’s semiconductor memory market share.

With its aim of having a commercially viable supply of domestic chips, given the national security and economic benefits, the Chinese government had designed three industrial policies which would escalate its semiconductor industry. These include the standard to promote National IC guidelines, Made in China 2025, and Made in China 2025 Technical Area Roadmap.

Manufacturers in the China semiconductor electronics industry are focused on product development through large scale investment in research and development activities and engineering capabilities, in an effort to cater to the requirements of mobile industry consumers.

As the semiconductor memory technology is promptly evolving to cater to growing needs of electronics industry, it is estimated to foresee a phenomenally high demand from various end-use industries. Robust deployment of the memory in smartphones, PCs, and gaming consoles would continue to expand prodigiously, positively impacting the remuneration graph of the overall semiconductor memory market, which is envisaged to cross a mammoth of $250bn by the end of 2026.