Technology Trends 2021- 3
As we approach a new year, we continue our series of  technology insights and predictions  by industry experts
Anand Ramamoorthy, Managing Director, Micron Technology, India, suggests trends in memory and storage
December 29 2020: The growth drivers in 20221  include: economic recovery from the pandemic; new CPU architectures, which are enabling higher server content; cloud, AI and machine-learning growth; robust mobile demand driven by 5G; and strength in gaming and automotive.
Mobile
The smartphone market has been impacted by COVID, but in 2021, we expect a rebound in smartphone unit volumes, coupled with robust average capacity growth across both DRAM and NAND solutions. 5G handset volumes could grow to approximately 500M units in 2021, from around 200M units in 2020, and these 5G products feature higher memory and storage content to enable enhanced user experience.
Data Centre
The data centre market continues to be a growth engine for Micron, and this year COVID-19 acceleratedthis growth, specifically in cloud. The market is expected to start its transition to DDR5 in the second half of FY21, and networking and 5G deployments, particularly in Asia, will drive healthy DRAM bit growth quarter-over-quarter.
PC & Graphics
Work from home trends continue to drive strong demand for notebooks, with pockets of nonmemory
component shortages in the supply chain. We expect a resurgence in desktop PC sales after a weak
2020 due to pandemic-driven changes to customer buying patterns.
Automotive Memory
In 2021, Auto DRAM and NAND will continue to see robust demand autonomous vehicles and even
connected cars promise more features including in-vehicle infotainment, 4K displays, AI-enabled
features like gesture recognition and natural language processing, we’re seeing an exponential increase in memory and compute demands. The modern automobile has more lines of code than any other application or operating system—more than Facebook, Windows 10, airplanes, etc. In fact, the amount of compute performance needed for cars is reaching data centre levels; in advanced driver assistance / autonomous driving, cars need hundreds of tera operations per second which is some of the highest levels of performance in the industry today, rivalling what you will find in data centres and servers. |
Given these trends, in 2021, we can expect to see automotive players increasingly turning to alternative options for low-power, energy-efficient memory and storage such as fast, high-bandwidth graphics memory and compact multi-chip packages.
Micron Technology, Inc., is an industry leader in innovative memory and storage solutions.