Sales of NOR flash in wireless applications in 2013 will decline by nearly one third compared to last year, although use of the memory remains strong in the embedded segment, according to IHS.
Wireless-based NOR revenues are forecast to reach US$725 million by year-end, down a sharp 28% from US$1 billion in 2012. The drop is projected in spite of a strong second-quarter finish of US$801 million, up not only from the first quarter but also a solid 5% increase from the same period of 2012, said IHS.
But with its glory days long past, NOR flash is headed toward continuing decline in a segment where it is increasingly falling out of favor. Wireless NOR revenues will fall further to US$480.4 million in 2014, on its way to just US$190.4 million by 2017, IHS predicted.
NOR's troubles in the wireless market stem from rival memories now being used in its place, IHS indicated. In smartphones, NOR - also known as parallel NOR - has been squeezed out by NAND, which can emulate NOR capabilities at far higher densities. On the low end where entry-level handsets are involved, parallel NOR is feeling pressure from serial peripheral interface (SPI) NOR - a low-power type of flash increasingly important to handset manufacturers interested in keeping costs down to a minimum. Meanwhile in tablets, NOR is used only in Android-based models but not in the Apple iPad, IHS observed.
The irreversible trend toward falling NOR revenues in wireless applications is propelling memory manufacturers to diversify their base to embedded applications and focus on multitechnology strategies. To this end, memory players have been taking serious initiatives, such as branching into next-generation nonvolatile memories or even going into a non-memory direction, all in hopes of remaining relevant as markets shift and adopt new memory paradigms for wireless devices.
Despite its inevitable decline, NOR still has some legs left in mobile wireless devices, particularly in e-book readers, IHS indicated. For instance, NOR flash is deployed in Amazon's Kindle Paperwhite as well the Nook Simple Touch from Barnes & Noble. In both devices, NOR chips store the bits that determine e-ink grayscale intensity.
More NOR chips are also used in the Microsoft Surface Pro PC tablet - five instead of just one for the lower-end Surface RT model - auguring well for products in the future that might employ a similar storage design, IHS said.
The NOR alternative known as phase-change memory (PCM) remains a market worth watching, IHS believes, with current forecasts of US$67 million in 2013 jumping to a projected US$138 million in 2014, before growth flattens to US$170 million by 2016, according to IHS. Even so, its long-term outlook is being toned down, with target markets narrower than initially believed and product adoption still limited long after PCM manufacturing has been expanded.
After years of production delays, the only major handset brands utilizing PCM are Nokia and Lenovo, as the Intel chipset they employ requires PCM technology.
Given the limited upside of both NOR and PCM, memory manufacturers seeking additional revenue streams to replace lost NOR income must turn elsewhere or explore other courses of action, IHS noted.
Spansion, for instance, is going through vertical integration around industrial applications, while SanDisk with Toshiba have demonstrated a new type of memory product known as resistive RAM. Such moves will help the industry deal with the evolving technology landscape, IHS said.
Moving forward, the non-volatile memories that will make their impact felt in the next few years will be 3D variations of NAND flash and memory involving the serial interface, with parallel NOR steadily receding into the background, IHS believes
Article translated by Jessie Shen
