The flash memory market has growth at an extremely fast rate, especially when compared with all other types of semiconductors. Much of this can be owed to the rabid use of flash memory in iPod portable media players, but also to the growth of the cellular phone market, where over 1.2 billion handsets are expected to be sold worldwide this year alone, as well as other electronic devices. We also investigate the various flash memory vendors, as well as their upcoming technology innovations and fabrication plant production plans.

Within the flash memory market there are two architectures NOR and NAND. In this report, we include projections for both NAND and NOR revenues and shipments. In 2005, total NAND revenues surpassed NOR revenues for the first time. The cellular phone is becoming a more important device for populating NAND chips, when that device previously almost exclusively used NOR chips. Besides the cellular phone market we dissect the various applications and devices where flash memory chips are being and will be used. We include projections for these major applications and devices that use flash memory.

Within its traditional core PC market, flash memory continues to play an important role, especially with the recent release of Microsoft’s new operating system—Vista. This new OS supports two new flash memory schemes ReadyBoost and ReadyDrive. Microsoft’s old partner, Intel has also gotten into the act with Turbo Memory (code name Robson), which support a flash memory architecture on the PC motherboard. Last of all solid state drives using flash memory and hybrid hard drives (HHD) using flash memory cache are beginning to appear in PCs. All of these latest innovations are designed to boost PC speed, performance and reliability and should insurance a greater use of flash memory with or within the PC for the foreseeable future.

We also present information on research into shrinking the flash die size and creating newer architectures such as Phase Change Memory and 3D Memory. Although the most cutting edges of these technologies are still years away from mass production, they may offer the next leap in flash memory technology.