Monthly Memory & Flash Market Watch
May 2022
Samsung announced UFS 4.0 offering 2x performance compared to UFS 3.1. It is said to be adopted in future automotive applications, Augmented reality (AR), and Virtual reality (VR). Mass production of the new memory is likely to commence in the third quarter of 2022.
Samsung plans to continue to expand the proportion of 3D NAND flash this year to 78% reported by TrendForce.
Samsung announced that the industry is looking to discontinue the production of DDR3 due to dwindling market demands, and higher demands for its DDR4 and DDR5 options instead.
KIOXIA and WDC have finalized a formal agreement to jointly invest in the first phase of the Fab7 (Y7) manufacturing facility in Yokkaichi Plant, Japan.
This joint-venture investment adds a sixth flash memory manufacturing facility to the Yokkaichi Plant, enhancing its position as the world's largest flash memory manufacturing site. The first phase of the Y7 facility will produce 3D flash memory including 112- and 162-layer and future nodes.
Activist investor Elliott Investment Management urged WDC on May 3rd to separate its Flash business and offered to invest US$1 billion to facilitate a sale or a spin-off of the business. WDC did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
SK Hynix announced that the industry is looking to discontinue the production of DDR3 due to dwindling market demands, and higher demands for its DDR4 and DDR5 options instead.
In the second fiscal quarter of 2022 Micron derived 73% of its revenue from DRAM chips and 25% from NAND chips. Those two segments also saw year-over-year revenue increases of 29% and 19%, respectively. Micron is taking several steps to capitalize on this growth, starting with a stronger focus in the data center market. In March, Micron announced the world's first vertically integrated 176-layer NAND SSD for the data center with latencies of under 2ms.
SUPPLY TREND
NAND Flash 512Gb TLC Contract Price and Sufficiency, 2021 - 2022
NAND Sufficiency: Shortage in Q222 due to WDC and KIOXIA’s material contamination. Expected to recover in July.
Price Trend: SSD prices are expected to remain at the same level.
DDR4 8Gb 1G*8 3200MHz ASP and Sufficiency, 2021 - 2022
DRAM Sufficiency: Expected to be sufficient until Q422.
Price Trend: Contract prices are expected to remain stable.
SUPPLY SIGNAL
| Type | Supply | Price | |
|---|---|---|---|
|
DRAM Module  |
DDR3 | ● | ▲ |
| DDR4 | ● | ▂ | |
| DDR5 | ● | ▂ | |
|
Flash Storage  |
SLC | ● | ▂ |
| MLC | ● | ▂ | |
| 3D TLC(BiCS3) | ● | ▲ | |
| 3D TLC(BiCS4) | ● | ▂ | |
| 3D TLC(BiCS5) | ● | ▂ |
● Smooth supply ● Tight supply ▂ Flat ▲ Upward trend
WORK WITH ADATA
The DDR3 allocation of the existing customers has been secured. For new customers, please reach out to us and see how we can facilitate your needs in our planning.
For customers who are using 3D TLC BiCS3, we encourage you to move to the latest technology such as BiCS4 or BiCS5. In case it is not possible in your application, we will be pleased to work on your annual demand and plan everything ahead.
Insights
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What Is the SSD Temperature Range?
Temperature is the silent limiter of every SSD, and the SSD temperature range is both a performance spec as well as a reliability spec. Under sustained load, NVMe firmware tracks a composite temperature and will start to throttle lightly or heavily. So, write throughput drops hard and latency spikes. Heat also speeds charge leakage inside NAND, which accelerates retention loss. The effect worsens as cells age from program/erase wear. Thus, you burn endurance faster and raise data-retention trouble when the drive later remains unpowered.
Garbage Collection in Industrial SSDs: What You Need to Know
Garbage collection in SSDs is the controller's quiet cleanup job. It compacts still-valid pages into new space and erases blocks that are now mostly junk. That might sound weird until you remember NAND flash can't overwrite a programmed page. It must erase first, and erase happens at the block level, not per page. So, updates become "write elsewhere, then clean later."
