Coughlin Associates and Objective Analysis released their 2024 report on emerging non-volatile memories, A Deep Look at New Memories. These memories include magnetic random access memory, MRAM; resistive random access memory ReRAM; ferroelectric random access memory, FRAM; as well as phase change memory, PCM. The future of these emerging memories depends upon technical characteristics, developments in existing higher volume memories as well as developing economies of scale.
In this market, the economies of scale reign supreme. We saw that with Intel’s 2022 termination of its Optane 3D XPoint campaign and had seen the same phenomenon play out before with NAND flash, whose high volume drove its costs below that of DRAM. The report delves deeply into the impact of the economies of scale, and concludes that both the success of NAND flash and the failure of Optane proved that wafer volume must approach 10% of the volume of a competing technology in order to reach cost parity.
The first widespread use of emerging memories is for embedded memory on a CMOS logic chip, replacing NOR flash, which has reached its scaling limit at 28nm, and is today frequently being replaced with MRAM and ReRAM. Single-transistor MRAM cells are now competing with multi-transistor static random access memory, SRAM, to dramatically reduce the number of memory transistors on a chip in order to provide a lower-cost, higher-density solution. Several enterprise, industrial and consumer devices currently use MRAM as an embedded memory, and this trend will continue.
MRAM processes have already been developed on conventional CMOS logic processes, allowing them to be built directly on top of CMOS logic wafers, using fewer additional mask steps than a more conventional flash memory. The use of a nonvolatile emerging memory can provide significant power savings in comparison to SRAM. As emerging memory cost per gigabyte ($/GB) approaches that of SRAM, this replacement could lead to significant market expansion.
Based upon these considerations of economy of scale, the report projects that total baseline emerging memory annual shipping capacity will rise from an estimated 340TB in 2023 to 8.46EB in 2034. Total emerging memory baseline revenues are expected to increase from $421M in 2023 to about $71.7B by 2034. The bulk of this rapid revenue growth will be supported by emerging memories’ displacement of SRAM, NOR flash and some DRAM.
Emerging memory demand should drive incremental demand for the capital equipment needed to manufacture these devices. This report models this requirement by focusing on the MRAM market. While MRAM can be built on standard CMOS circuits supplied by large semiconductor fabricators, specialized fabrication equipment is required for the MRAM layers.
This additional equipment is similar to or the same as that used in manufacturing the magnetic read sensors in hard disk drives. Other emerging memory technologies will require their own complement of additional equipment, most of it identical to tools that are already in widespread use.
Growing demand for emerging memory technologies will increase total manufacturing equipment revenues by an estimated $53.4M in 2023 to between $434M to $3.8B by 2034 with a baseline projected spending of $2.4B. The chart below shows the baseline production equipment annual spending projections.
New non-volatile memory report projects that baseline industry revenues could rise to 71.7B by 2034 as they achieve economies of scale and displace SRAM, NOR flash and some DRAM.
