Expect tighter supply, higher tags for SRAM
By Staff -- Purchasing, 4/20/2000 2:00:00 AM
Booming demand from networking equipment and cellular phone manufacturers coupled with a lack of capacity investment will mean a tighter supply of sram for the rest of the year. Buyer can expects tags to rise and leadtimes to stretch.
Prices increased in the first quarter and will likely increase through the rest of the year. Some suppliers say prices for their products increased 25% or more in Q1.
"Last quarter a 32K x 8 sram was going for 70¢. Now it is $1.25," says Mike Ramirez, strategic marketing manager for Hyundai. "A 1-Mb part was $1.35-$1.40, now it's $2.20. There's no doubt about it, prices are rising."
Brian Matas, an analyst with market researcher IC Insights, says he expects average selling prices to increase about 8% more through the rest of the year. But prices for some parts will rise even more.
Increased sram demand and higher tags mean that sram will have double-digit growth for the next several years. The SRAM market will grow from about $4.6 billion in 1999 to $7.7 billion in 2004, according to IC Insights. That growth is impressive because some analysts had predicted the demise of the sram market about two years ago. sram had been used primarily as L2 cache memory in computers. However, Intel and other microprocessor manufacturers have integrated sram onto its microprocessors, resulting in less demand for discrete sram components from computer makers.
While demand from the computer industry declined, the communications industry has given the sram market new life. Slow-speed sram-those with access times more than 30 nanoseconds (ns)-are used in cell telephones.
Cell phone handset shipments are booming, increasing from 163 million in 1998 to 258 million in 1999. In 2000, cell phone shipments are forecast to rise to 356 million, according to IC Insights.
J.B Ra, senior marketing manager for sram for Samsung, says that 90% of slow-speed sram are in fact shipped to mobile telephone manufacturers. In fact, demand has been so strong that most slow-speed sram that Samsung ships are on allocation, says Ra. He says 4-Mb parts are most in demand, but 1- and 2- and 8-Mb also are shipping. Samsung expects to sample a 16-Mb SRAM this summer, with production beginning in Q1 2001.
High-speed sram, with access times of less than 30 ns, are used in a variety of networking equipment, including hubs, routers and switches. The networking equipment market is expected to rise from $36.8 billion in 1999 to $42.3 billion in 2000, according to Cahners-InStat.
The growth of those two end markets is resulting in strong sram demand. "Our demand has more than doubled over the first quarter of last year," says Roman Komanovsky, tactical marketing manager for sram for Hyundai. "We are shipping huge volumes to cellular customers," he says.
"Demand has exceeded supply in the first quarter," adds Brian Kumagai, business development engineer for static memory products for Toshiba. "We're getting calls from buyers for additional support because they can't get enough product from other suppliers," he says. He says that demand is strong for 256 K, 1 Mb and 4 Mb parts. Cellular, PC peripherals and point-of-sale machines are driving demand, he says.
But increased demand isn't the only reason that sram supply has tightened. "The tightening has come from some of the original suppliers that decided to convert their capacity to other products," says Mike Ramirez, strategic marketing manager for Hyundai. "Some suppliers decided to run dram instead of sram, and some decided to get out of sram altogether because they could make more money doing customized foundry business," he says. " Some people decided it wasn't worth it to build sram anymore."
While demand has been strong for 1 and 2-Mb slow-speed sram because of cell phone demand, demand is equally strong for high-speed parts used in networking equipment.
Buyers can expect higher density, higher performing fast sram later this year, according to Jerry Johnson, strategic marketing manager for Micron. Micron makes only high-speed sram. More 8-Mb parts will ship this year and Micron will be shipping a 16 Mb sram by the end of the year.
Micron will also introduce a "quad data rate" sram. "It's a double data rate sram with separate input and outputs that can be accessed simultaneously so you can do four data transactions per clock," he says. "You can do reads and two writes simultaneously per clock."
He says the part will be of interest to networking equipment manufacturers because there is no bus contention-there is a separate input/output. Micron will ship samples this quarter and go into production later in the year.
"We are bullish on sram technology because bandwidth doesn't appear to be going to let up anytime in the next decade," says Johnson. "There are so many technologies and so many consumer-type products that are going to demand more bandwidth than we ever dreamed on systems. The way to achieve that is with some very fast buffers with very fast memory subsystems."
Hyundai will introduce a new family of fast sram this year, says Ramirez. Hyundai will offer 4 Mb, and 8 Mb synchronous and asynchronous sram.
"We have refocused," he says. "Cellular and networking are going to be the big runners for sram, so we refocused our strength and strategy in pursuing those markets," says Ramirez.
He says there is pressure to bring out new, faster, higher density sram. That pressure is driven by the Internet and faster processor speeds.
To meet those requirements, Toshiba produces a 9 Mb NT (no turnaround) sram, says Paul Liu, business development manager for high-speed static memory products. "It has 100% bus efficiency. There are no idle cycles," he says. An 18-Mb NT sram will be available later in the year.
Agile, PartMiner link up
Agile Software has formed a partnership with PartMiner, a business-to-business marketplace for electronic components.
Under the terms of the agreement, MyAgile.com, Agile's business-to-business portal for collaboration and commerce across extended supply chains, will feature PartMiner as the premier online market-maker for hard-to-find and shortage parts, with the two companies sharing revenues generated by the agreement. Additionally, in a separate arrangement, Agile has made a strategic equity investment in PartMiner.
As part of this agreement, PartMiner will be seamlessly linked to Agile's Internet-based Agile Buyer and Agile Anywhere products through open Internet XML standards. All Agile customers will gain access, at no additional cost, to capsxpert, PartMiner's database of millions of electronic components. capsxpert features both descriptions and technical data sheets of semiconductors, passive and active components, interconnect devices, and discontinued components.
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