Analyst predicts a healthy 13 per cent growth in both DRam and Nand Flash markets

The DRam and Nand Flash markets are showing surprising strength this year, according to the latest research from iSuppli, which has predicted that the combined markets will grow by a healthy 13 per cent in 2006.

The analyst said that the two markets, which are the largest memory markets, will achieve combined 2006 revenues of $40.2bn, up by almost 13 per cent from the 2005 figure of $35.6bn. This year will see stronger growth in the memory market, which saw a 7.5 per cent increase in 2005.

Unusually, the DRam market experienced early price increases in the first few months, which has buoyed overall revenues. Even though these price hikes have eased, iSuppli has predicted a good year. Worldwide DRam sales are expected to hit $26.4bn, up by 6.2 per cent on last year. This is a big improvement on previous forecasts, which predicted that the DRam market was going to shrink by five per cent in 2006.

Nam Hyung Kim, principal analyst at iSuppli, said: “The recently announced delay in Microsoft’s Vista will not have an impact on the 2006 DRam forecast. We had predicted that the new operating system would arrive at the end of the fourth quarter, so this will not have much influence on the memory market until 2007.

“We will watch several key application markets closely to ascertain their impact on the memory market. For Nand Flash, these applications include hand-held games, personal media players and mobile PCs. For DRam, keys areas to watch will include video game consoles and mobile phones.”

In related news, Kingston Technology has released a range of memory modules for the workstation and server market, based on fully buffered, or FB-Dimm technology.

FB-Dimm overcomes the speed-versus-capacity limitations of double data rate 2 (DDR2) memory, breaking the 16GB barrier to allow high performance systems to boost performance by adding memory.

JK Tsai, director of technology at Kingston, said: “FB-Dimm architecture increases server memory capacity from 8GB to 192GB at a high speed, based on a 4GB-module configuration. In addition to higher capacity, the FB-Dimms have a peak bandwidth that is four times greater than standard DDR2 server modules.”