A new 2009 Report from Yole Développement
How 3-D integration will challenge and reshape the memory industry …

The memory semiconductor industry is about to go through a period of major technological changes as new integration trends and disruptive packaging technologies pave the way to the future growth of this industry …

Yole’s study presents the end applications driving the use of 3-D integrated memories and their key players. It also includes an overview of the memory packaging market, its forecasted evolutions with new applications and growth in Flash and DRAM market.

Historically, the DRAM memory market has been mostly driven by computing applications, while NOR Flash has been mainly deployed into consumer and communication devices. More recently, NAND Flash memory has emerged as the most promising solid state storage solution for current consumer devices and is showing as the best candidate for hard disk drive replacement in the near future.

Integration is the next challenge

On the other hand, today wireless is growing and enabling new market segments everywhere, (smart-phones, mobile pocket computing devices…). As a result, CONNECTIVIY and INTEGRATION are now new drivers to deal with. Demand for data is increasing everywhere: Faster pipes, more pipes (WAN, LAN, PAN), HD multimedia... Current complexity and concurrency require more than ever higher data capacity, improved power consumption and is stressing existing well established architectures: new interconnects, integration schemes and packaging technologies are needed to support higher performance, breakthrough density and low power consumption devices. 3-D IC integration is showing as a major solution path to tackle these challenges and memories will be key components in achieving this successful integration.

3-D integration will open a new application space for memory market growth

Yole Developpement has followed the burgeoning 3-D Packaging industry since its early beginning. The global economic downturn is challenging the fast adoption of the “Through Silicon Vias” technology into high volume applications such as low cost memories. “However, we are seeing concrete signs that this market is definitely taking-off, with the first 3-D integrated DRAM memories being shipped this year: we estimate that about 20000 wafers of DRAM memory will be shipped with 3D TSV by the end of 2009, with production moving forward to higher volumes in 2010” explained Jérôme Baron, Technology & Market Analyst at Yole Développement.

By 2013, Yole Développement expects that telecom and computing industries will drive more than 70% of the total volume for 3-D TSV stacked memories.

3-D integration with memories is a hot topic at the moment because of the challenging market conditions and of the important investment needed for building the required infrastructure. As a result, pre-competitive alliances and partnerships may be necessary to drive the risk down while accelerating product adoption. Memory manufacturers, CMOS foundries, OSAT packaging houses, Fab-less IC players and integrated device manufacturers are all concerned and actively preparing for this ultimate integration.