Smartphones to drive DRAM, says IHS

LONDON – Shipments of DRAMs for use in smartphones, will rise to 1.7 billion gigabits in 2011, up 157 percent from 672 million gigabits in 2010, according to market research firm IHS. By 2015, shipments will increase to 13.9 billion units, up 700 percent from 2011, as presented in the figure below.

In four recently released smartphones, teardowns have revealed much larger quantities of DRAM than before. The Xperia Play from Sony Ericsson has 512-Mbytes, the Galaxy Indulge from Samsung Electronics Co. Ltd. features 5760-Mbytes. The iPhone 4 from Apple has 544-Mbyes and the HTC Thunderbolt has 768-Mbytes. These figures are four to six times what the maximum use of DRAM was in 2010 models, IHS said.

The use of DRAM included packaged memories as well multi-die components that included non-volatile NAND flash memory, sometimes with both approaches in the same phone.



The cost of memory as a proportion of the bill of materials (BOM) for the four phones listed stood at about 15.7 percent IHS (El Segundo, Calif.) said, with the iPhone 4 at the top end where memory was 22.1 percent of the BOM.

The average smartphone DRAM use is expected to rise by 55 percent in 2012 up to 715-Mbytes up from 461-Mbytes in 2011. There is no near term limitation on the demand to include memory in smartphones, IHS concluded.

Meanwhile tablet computers and smartphones are cannibalizing the market for PCs, which remains the biggest user of DRAM.

As a result the smartphones' share of DRAM consumption is expected to grow from 7.6 percent in 2011, up from 4.4 percent in 2010 to 10.6 percent in 2012, to 13.4 percent in 2013, 14.9 percent in 2014 and 16.0 percent in 2015.


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