Electronic Storage Market

According to Gartner, Inc., global semiconductor revenues hit $449.8 billion in 2020, reflecting an increase of 7.3% from 2019, following a 12% decline from the prior year in 2019.

Global memory product sales raised $13.5 billion last year, representing 44% of total semiconductor device sales growth. This is mainly due to the increased demand for servers and PCs as well as mobile devices due to home office and homeschooling. NAND flash storage, with sales growth of 23.9%, was the most in demand and, according to Gartner, achieved a total volume of $52.8 billion, an increase of $10.2 billion compared to 2019. In the first half of 2020, prices rose and while demand from Hyperscale customers and OEMs spiked, the effects of the pandemic resulted in oversupply in the second half of 2020, slowing annual sales growth.

At the beginning of 2020, Samsung Electronics Co., Ltd. planned to increase production capacities for DRAMs, but this was then postponed. The production figures of SK Hynix, Inc. and Micron Technology, Inc. also remained unchanged.

The average increase in prices for server DRAMs was 7%. For DRAMs for the PC market and in the mobile sector, prices rose by 0.5%. In contrast, the prices of DRAMs in the graphics sector rose by 5% to 10% and for consumer DRAMs by 3% to 8%. In general, it is forecasted that the price of DRAMs will rise in 1Q21 and will likely continue throughout the year.

According to research by the market information provider TrendForce Corp., the demand for WiFi routers has increased significantly due to the occurrence of Covid 19. Wafer producers like PSMC had to adapt their production processes to the increased demand for NAND flash products, which led to delivery delays.

Some NAND flash suppliers stopped producing SLC products. Due to these developments, contract prices for SLC chips are expected to increase.

Experience shows that the demand for MLC chips will decline sharply at the beginning of the new year. Since the total production capacity for these chips is steadily decreasing, the inventory is generally very low. It is assumed that prices will therefore remain constant.

Due to the pandemic-induced stay-at-home economy and the robust demand for cloud services, server manufacturers achieved impressive sales and profit results in 2020 and are expected to experience just as growth dynamics in 2021, as the framework conditions will not change in the medium term due to the ongoing pandemic will.

New products for market
To keep up with the evolution of the memory market, Innodisk Corp. has updated its product families. The on-site recovery product series InnoOSR relies on the backup and recovery of a single device. Several methods of triggering system integration are available, from a simple manual click to automated solution. The 2.5-inch SATA SSD is available in capacities from 64GB to 1TB and the M.2 2242 is available from 54GB to 512GB. Both variants are also designed for the extended operating temperature range from -40°C to +85°C.

The DRAM product update was carried out for various FPGA applications such as ML, AI, beamforming, radio stations and in the area of testing. Challenges are the various areas of application such as high-speed computing, high-frequency transmissions, in extreme heat and in harsh outdoor environments. The DDR4 products have a reliably high access time of 3,200MT/s in the extended temperature range from -40°C to +85°C. The anti-sulfuration feature was updated.

The modules of the CAN bus series are developed for harsh environments. They support SAE J1939 / CANopen High Layer protocols and are available in different form factors for different motherboards.

Smart agriculture – saving fuel consumption
One possible area of application for the latest technologies is intelligent agriculture. Modern agricultural machines work with CAN bus systems in order to communicate between different MCUs and sensors for data acquisition. This can make agriculture more efficient. A issue in agricultural applications is to adapt the settings of the implements to different crops and terrain in order to save fuel. Existing in-vehicle platforms and platforms based on CAN bus are used for agricultural vehicles. The Innodisk CAN bus module establishes the connection between the software and the distributed CAN controllers on the agricultural machines. Precise load requirements for harvesting machines in various areas can be determined in order to reduce fuel consumption.