DRAM is the fastest growing product category

DRAM was the fastest growing chip product in 2018, says IC Insights.

The 2018 DRAM market is expected to show an increase of 39%, a solid follow-up to the 77% growth in 2017.

It was also the fastest-growing IC segment in 2013 and 2014.

IC Insights forecasts that DRAM will rank nearly last in terms of market growth in 2019, with a 1% decrease in total sales.

After two strong years of growth, Samsung, SK Hynix, and Micron—the world’s three primary DRAM suppliers—have expanded their manufacturing capacity and are beginning to ramp up production, bringing some much needed relief to strained supplies, especially for high-performance DRAM devices.

At the same time, shipments of large-scale datacenter servers, which were a primary catalyst for much of the recent DRAM market surge, have begun to ease as uncertain economic and trade conditions factor into decisions about continuing with the strong build out.

NAND flash joins DRAM as another memory segment that has enjoyed very strong growth over the past two years.

Solid-state computing, particularly, has been a key driver for high-density, high-performance NAND flash even as mobile applications continue to be a significant driver.

Meanwhile, automotive and computing special purpose logic devices have also been strong performers the past two years.

The top five IC markets listed for 2018 are the only product categories that are expected to surpasses the 17% growth rate of the total IC market this year.

Source from:electronicsweekly