Peter Clarke

EE Times

(07/29/2005 8:59 AM EDT)

LONDON — The market for NAND flash memories is set to reach $36.1 billion in 2008 prior to a price collapse in 2009 according to market research company Semico Research Corp.

“Megabyte growth will average 129 percent over the term of the forecast,” said Jim Handy, director of Nonvolatile Memory Services at market research company Semico (Phoenix, Ariz.), in a statement. “At a growth rate of 100 percent the industry ships more megabytes in one year than it has over the whole history of the market. In fact, more NAND megabytes shipped in 2004 than DRAM did in the entire 1990s”

Semico said the established suppliers of NAND flash are: Samsung, Toshiba, SanDisk, Renesas, and M-Systems. The emerging suppliers include: Hynix, STMicroelectronics, Micron Technology, and Infineon.

The companies affected by the market are the card suppliers: such as Lexar Media, Kingston, Viking Technologies; the camera companies that include Nikon, Olympus, Kodak, Canon, and Fuji Film; the MP3 player vendors including Apple, Creative, and Sony, and some of their suppliers such as SigmaTel.