Emerging Memory Market to Hit $20 Billion by 2029 Boosting Manufacturing Equipment Revenue to $854 Million

Emerging memories are well on their way to reach $20 billion of combined revenues by 2029. 

That’s the finding of a newly-released report by Objective Analysis and Coughlin Associates: Emerging Memories Ramp Up ($15,000 at Objective Analysis, $7,500 at Couglhin Associates, 171 pages).

The emerging memory market will grow to this $20 billion level largely by displacing today’s less efficient memory technologies like NOR flash and SRAM, and will even displace a share of DRAM sales.  These memories will be adopted both as standalone memory chips and as the embedded memories within other chips like microcontrollers, ASICs, and even compute processors.

“Emerging memory technologies have reached a critical point where they make sense in more applications than ever before,” said Jim Handy, general director, Objective Analysis.  “Future process shrinks will team up with improved economies of scale to drive down prices, allowing these memories to compete more effectively against today’s most popular volatile and nonvolatile technologies.“

“This transition to emerging memory technologies will spawn many new side benefits,” said Dr. Thomas Coughlin, president, Coughlin Associates.  “AI and ML will get a big boost from large inexpensive low-power nonvolatile memories.  Large-scale computing systems will migrate to nonvolatile main memory and cache to provide near-immediate recovery from power failures. These memories will drive the development of completely new computer architectures that can retain their state even when powered down.“

The report’s forecasts predict that the 3D XPoint Memory’s sub-DRAM prices will drive revenues to over $16 billion by 2029, while stand-alone MRAM and STT-RAM revenues will approach $4 billion, or over one hundred seventy times 2018’s MRAM revenues. In addition, ReRAM and MRAM will compete to replace the bulk of embedded NOR and SRAM in SoCs, fueling even greater revenue growth.

The industry’s migration to emerging memory technologies will launch a solid increase in capital equipment spending. Total MRAM manufacturing equipment revenue will grow to thirty three times its 2018 total of $26 million to reach $854 million in 2029.