[Repost] New changes in the mobile storage market: How can foreign technologies seize opportunities in China?

More and more mobile terminals are becoming smarter and more versatile. The number of smartphones, tablets, and wearable devices is growing. Forced by consumers to shift more toward mobile terminals, major memory manufacturers have gradually adjusted their direction to the mobile market. This is obviously an inevitable trend.

Micron Technology, one of the leading manufacturers in the global semiconductor storage industry, achieved net sales of $16.4 billion in fiscal year 2014. At the same time, its storage revenue in 2014 ranked second among many companies. It is a low-key company that rarely appears in front of the media. It is a company that pays more attention to engineering culture and pays more attention to technology and products.

Recently, the author exclusively interviewed Reynette Au, Vice President of Mobile Solutions Marketing at Micron. In her opinion, from the perspective of the mobile industry, anything involving "smart" depends largely on storage technology, and a large part of the value of smartphones depends on storage devices. How to improve system performance through storage is currently a topic of great concern in the industry.

Memory storage is undergoing a transformation

The Internet of Everything has led to an explosive growth in data. The growth and diversification of data has brought opportunities and challenges to storage devices. Storage manufacturers including Micron Technology are undergoing a transformation. Currently, Micron's main market segments include mobile devices, machine-to-machine (M2M), network construction, cloud computing and big data.

Reynette Au believes that the mobile business is the top priority of Micron Technology's product line. "As users' requirements for mobile terminal functions increase, specific applications become more complex and the requirements for hardware become higher and higher. The current solution is to continuously add more sensors and higher processing power to meet user requirements. In this way, it is particularly important to think about the design of the entire system, especially what kind of storage technology the platform should use. This will further promote the trend of mobile storage demand.

The rapid growth of the number of mobile terminals is driving the development of the storage market, which will lead to an exponential increase in the demand for mobile memory. In July 2012, Micron Technology agreed to acquire Japanese chip manufacturer Elpida Memory for approximately US$2.5 billion. At the same time, in 2014, it announced that it would expand the production of mobile DRAM used in mobile devices. According to foreign media reports, Micron's investment this time will be as high as 100 billion yen, mainly used to expand the original Elpida Memory factory in Hiroshima, Japan, which was acquired in 2014. Through this investment and expansion, Micron expects to increase the production capacity of mobile devices by 20% by August 2015. It is not difficult to see Micron Technology's determination and ambition in the mobile business from a series of actions.

Reynette Au revealed: "From a global perspective, the mobile storage market accounts for 40% of DRAM usage, and from a NAND perspective, 40% of NAND is used in the mobile market. Micron, as one of the top three manufacturers in the world, can provide both DRAM and NAND technologies. We are constantly working to increase our market share."

Taking the Pulse of Opportunities in the Chinese Market

Based on the development of the mobile terminal market, China is a huge market. In fact, Micron's emphasis on the Chinese market has been truly reflected since 2007. Since that year, Micron has established a marketing and sales team specifically for the Chinese market.

With the commercial deployment of 4G in China starting last year, mobile devices have ushered in a new round of development boom, which will inevitably bring opportunities and challenges to chip and storage technologies.

China's mobile market is a very important market. On the one hand, it is a large market. On the other hand, it is also a market that is evolving very rapidly and is driving the development of the global mobile phone market.

Reynette Au believes: "The Chinese mobile market is not only large in volume, but also of very high quality in the future. Chinese mobile phone manufacturers are determined to build themselves into internationally renowned brands. Therefore, their actions will also affect the global mobile market. From this perspective, the Chinese market is even more important."

She said that Micron has already had a lot of cooperation with Chinese mobile phone manufacturers, including OPPO, Xiaomi, Huawei, BBK, Lenovo, etc. "Another very important aspect of our product strategy is to cooperate with chip manufacturers. We have seen that many key chip manufacturers in the Chinese market have designed technical roadmaps for the mobile market and are very concerned about this market. Regardless of what platform these chip manufacturers use for production, we hope to provide them with storage support."

The pyramid of mobile storage

Mobile storage currently faces the contradiction between product performance and low power consumption. Micron's goal is to resolve this contradiction, which is also Micron's advantage.

In terms of the layout of mobile products, Micron's "pyramid" layout has already taken shape. Micron's mobile product portfolio includes LPDRAM, eMMC, and eMPC, and its products fully cover the applications in the mobile market. In terms of the products produced by the entire company, Micron provides more storage product portfolios, from basic DRAM, NAND and NOR flash memory, to solid-state drives, modules, multi-chip packages (MPC), hybrid memory cubes (HMC), and other semiconductor systems.

According to Reynette Au, in the mobile phone market, the new multi-chip packaging solution of the eMCP product line is welcomed by customers and is currently mainly targeted at mid- and low-end entry-level mobile phone applications, while eMMC is targeted at the high-end market.

In addition, Micron's latest generation of storage device products, LPDDR4, has the advantage of resolving the contradiction between low power consumption and high performance. According to reports, the architecture and interface design of LPDDR4 low-power storage have undergone major changes compared to previous generations. The joint development of LPDDR4 samples began last year, but mass production began this year. Micron expects LPDDR4 to become mainstream in 2017 and beyond.

Reynette Au said: "The first major task in 2015 is to help the market better understand and adopt LPDDR4. Because this is a new generation of products, we hope that more customers can understand the benefits of using LPDDR4 low-power memory."

"From the overall mission of Micron Technology, our core technological advantage lies in storage. Therefore, we will further leverage our years of expertise, experience and technology in storage solutions to further support the innovation of other manufacturers, some system suppliers, etc." Reynette Au concluded.

More information

This article is excerpted from CWW Communication World Network, written by Wei Hui. Please click "Read Original" to view more content.

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