Strong demand for smartphones, tablets and other personal electronics devices that use flash memory, will lead to the fact that the market for flash memory such as NAND and NOR will grow this year by 2% to reach $ 30.4 billion. Given that the market for DRAM memory type for the year will amount to 28.0 billion dollars, IC Insights analysts, argue that the current year will be the first where flash memory market will be more than DRAM.
Excluding 2010, DRAM and flash memory markets were developed in a close pace over the past few years, but weaker demand for memory devices such as DRAM, associated with the situation in the PC market coupled with the growing popularity of tablets and smartphones has led to the fact that flash memory sales outpaced DRAM.
The smartphone market this year will grow by 55%, reaching 750 million and the tablet market - by 80%, to 117 million units.
Analysts believe that in 2017 the gap between flash memory and DRAM will increase. Already in 2013, only flash memory type NAND will be sold for a large sum than DRAM memory.