Date: 15th Feb 2011
Tablets and smartphones enable fast growth
in NAND flash consumption
With the growth in sales of Tablets and smartphones, the
key memory storage device NAND type flash memory is expected
to grow faster. This will be a good news for flash memory
semiconductor vendors. According to new IHS iSuppli research,
tablet consumption of NAND flash is expected to increase
to 2.3 billion gigabytes (GB) in 2011, up a phenomenal 382.4
percent from 476.8 million GB in 2010, reflecting a 4.8
times increase in 1-GB-equivalent units during the past
year. IHS iSuppli predicts the shipments of NAND to reach
12.3 billion GB by 2014.
Along with proliferation of smartphones and tablets the
content stored on phones is also rising exponentially. The
office files, media content such a photos and video need
huge amount of storage. IHS iSuppli says the proportion
of NAND flash use among tablets, measured against the total
supply of NAND memory, will jump to 11.8 percent in 2011,
significantly up from 4.3 percent last year. By 2014, that
figure will climb to 16 percent.
"The bump in NAND consumption among tablets is likely
to come from devices such as Apple Inc.'s iPad as well as
a raft of tablet devices powered by the rival Android operating
system, expected to hit the market this year," said
Dee Nguyen, analyst for memory and storage at IHS. "Together,
the iPad and Android-based tablets form one strand of the
tablet experience offered by manufacturers-one centering
on Internet-based media consumption. For such tablets, internal
storage capacity is less an issue because the devices are
intended to provide entertainment, not a full PC computing
experience."
As per the IHS iSuppli the average memory densities will
range from 27.1GB for non-iPad slates to 41.5GB in the iPad.
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