How 3D integration will 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 …

A study by Yole Développement presents the end applications driving the use of 3D 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 the 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.

At the same time, wireless is growing and enabling new market segments everywhere (smart-phones, mobile pocket computing devices). As a result, connectivity 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. 3D IC integration is showing as a major solution path to tackle these challenges and memories will be key components in achieving this successful integration.

Yole has followed the burgeoning 3D 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 3D integrated DRAM memories being available this year. We estimate that about 20,000 wafers of DRAM memory will be shipped with 3D TSV by the end of 2009, with production moving forward to higher volumes in 2010.”

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

3D 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.

This study aims to answer the following questions: What are the end applications driving the use of 3D integrated memories in the flash and DRAM market? Who are the key players doing it? How will it happen? When will the market ramp up? What is the impact of the current economic turmoil application per application?

Finally, how big is this 3D memory market going to be and what will it cost?