DRAM content rises and becomes more uniform in smartphones, IHS says

Press release; Jessie Shen, DIGITIMES [Thursday 27 September 2012]

The average amount of DRAM in each smartphone shipped worldwide is expected to surge by nearly 50% in 2012, as smartphones gain greater functionality, according to IHS iSuppli.

Average DRAM content in smartphones will expand to 666 megabytes (MB) in 2012, up from 453MB in 2011 and 202MB in 2010, IHS predicted.

The average density of DRAM chips in smartphones also is climbing and becoming more uniform. The 4-gigabit (Gb) chip in 2012 commands roughly a 37% share of the DRAM market for smartphones, followed closely by the 8Gb chip configuration with 36%, IHS said. However, the 8Gb chip will take over the market with a leading 46% share among smartphones in 2013, while share of the 4Gb will decline to 28%, IHS pointed out.

An even higher-density configuration, the 16Gb, is forecast to take the lion's share in the years ahead, indicating that DRAM density growth will continue uninterrupted for some time to come, IHS said. In 2012, 16Gb DRAM will account for just 2% market share. Its portion will jump to 15% in 2013, and become the primary density configuration by 2015 with 56% market share, IHS noted.

"As smartphones become more sophisticated, memory usage in the devices continues to rise—not only to satisfy user wants and needs but also to accommodate demands made by ever-more powerful processors and increasingly refined LCD screens," said Clifford Leimbach, analyst for memory demand forecasting at IHS. "And as memory has increased in smartphones, the industry has moved from a complex world featuring differing memory densities, to a simpler space where phones look increasingly similar from a memory perspective."

Teardowns show rising DRAM usage in smartphones

In another sign that DRAM use is growing in smartphones, the DRAM configurations found by the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis service in its dissections of phones confirmed a trend of increasing DRAM loading in the devices. None of the smartphone models being analyzed last year (2011) had more than 800MB of DRAM. This year (2012), however, all had at least 1,024MB—or one gigabyte (GB)—except for the Nokia Lumia 900 and the Apple iPhone 4S, both of which featured 512MB of DRAM.

It was not clear why the Lumia had less DRAM than its competitors, but it was the only phone in the sample using the Windows operating system, IHS indicated. And DRAM for the new iPhone 5 has risen to 1,024MB due to new features that the phone has added, such as a more powerful processor and more memory-intensive applications, IHS noted. The other torn down phones with at least 1GB of DRAM included the Note and Galaxy S3 from Samsung, the Droid Razr XT912 from Motorola and the One X from HTC.

The rise of DRAM densities as well as increased DRAM loading in smartphones is matched by even more aggressive growth of another type of memory in smartphones—NAND flash, according to IHS. A year ago, NAND configuration in smartphones ranged from as little as 1GB or 2GB for discrete NAND. This year, none of the phones observed by the IHS iSuppli Teardown Analysis service had less than 16GB of internal NAND capacity—a sizable leap for sure.