Technavio market research analysts forecast the global MRAM market to grow at a CAGR of close to 94% during the forecast period, according to their latest report.
The market study covers the present scenario and growth prospects of the global MRAM market for 2017-2021. The report also lists STT-MRAM and Toggle MRAM as the two major product segments, of which STT-MRAM accounted for more than 63% of the market share in 2016. STT-MRAM devices are more efficient, faster, and easier to scale down as compared to toggle MRAM devices.
“MRAM is a type of nonvolatile memory that utilizes magnetic charges for storing data instead of electric charges as in the case of DRAM and SRAM technologies. MRAM offers the added advantage of higher density in terms of writing and reading speed. In addition, MRAM retains the data even when turned off and consumes less amount of electricity, unlike DRAM and SRAM,” says Navin Rajendra, an industry expert for embedded systems research at Technavio.
Technavio’s sample reports are free of charge and contain multiple sections of the report including the market size and forecast, drivers, challenges, trends, and more.
Technavio hardware and semiconductor analysts highlight the following three market drivers that are contributing to the growth of the global MRAM market:
- Increasing demand for data centers
- Growing Internet of things (IoT) and big data operations
- Enterprise adoption of cloud-based storage
Increasing demand for data centers
High amount of system memory has become crucial for the proper functioning of new types of enterprise and data center applications. DRAM cannot provide the required capacity and low energy required for these data centers. MRAM has advanced features like low-power consumption and higher memory capacity than DRAM. Thus, MRAM is expected to replace DRAM in data centers and enterprise storages during the forecast period.
The demand for data centers among CSPs, government agencies, and telecommunications organizations is growing. Thus, with an increase in the demand for data centers globally, the manufacturers will invest in new technologies that will be equipped with MRAMs, which will drive the global MRAM market.
Growing Internet of things (IoT) and big data operations
There will be around 30 billion Internet-connected devices worldwide by 2020, which will be a major revenue generator for data center storage market as growing connected devices will lead to the generation of high volumes of data. Terms such as a connected car, connected home, connected health, and smart cities are gaining popularity. Many industries such as manufacturing, utilities, retail, automotive, and social media use IoT.
IoT devices demand an energy-efficient network of smart nodes that need to be always powered on, always connected, and always aware, with low active duty cycles. The present IoT devices rely on both nonvolatile storage and volatile working memory simultaneously.
“Manufacturers have introduced a unified memory subsystem that is built on embedded STT-MRAM. This system offers faster processing and is cost and energy efficient as compared to the older technologies,” says Navin.
Enterprise adoption of cloud-based storage
Storing data on the cloud is proving to be an effective medium for enterprises worldwide. Many enterprises started moving their data to the cloud (storage-as-a-service) by selecting service providers such as Amazon Web Service, Microsoft Azure, and Google Cloud Platform. DRAM has been used in cloud computing applications. However, MRAM has better features like fast read-write and low error rate compared with DRAM, and thus, it is expected that DRAM will soon be replaced by MRAM in the future.