Global SRAM and ROM Design IP Market - Growth, Trends, COVID-19 Impact, and Forecasts (2022 - 2027)

The global SRAM Design IP market was valued at USD 627.26 million in 2020, and it is expected to reach USD 563.15 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of -1.54% and the global ROM Design IP market was valued at USD 190.54 million in 2020, and it is expected to reach USD 201.04 million by 2026, registering a CAGR of 0.87%, during the period of 2021-2026. ​

Key Highlights

• Fast data volume growth and increasing preference for online content have encouraged storage producers to innovate continually. The demand for electronics components in the consumer electronics segment and microcontrollers, embedded systems, programable devices, and application-specific ICs in the industrial and scientific sector, automotive industry, continues to escalate the SRAM market.​
• SRAM vendors are investing significantly to develop more efficient forms of SRAM technologies. For instance, OEM manufacturers are integrating more compact types of technologies in their product offerings and demanding small SRAM modules for their respective product offerings. ​​For instance, as of December 2019, the Vision FPGA System on Module (SoM) by TinyVision.ai offered low-power computer vision and on-device machine learning in a compact package. The board is based upon Lattice iCE40UP5k FPGA, with 4Mb qSPI flash and 64Mb qSPI SRAM.
• ROM type of semiconductor memory technology is mainly used for storing programs and data that must survive even if a computer or processor is powered down. In recent years, the ROM memory is being increasingly replaced by flash memory. In general, maximum ROM memory capacity is lagging behind the flash memory (4-8 times), and in many of the original applications, ROM is replaced by flash memory, which experienced a significantly high growth in both capacity and market volume. ​
• However, the growing advancement in the EEPROM segment, especially in 2019, and emerging various new applications for microcontrollers, are some of the significant factors providing support to the ROM design IP market. Product innovations, in 2019, such as EEPROM memory chips, developed by semiconductor vendors for IoT and wireless applications in the medical, utility, and various other end-user industries, are expected to expand the scope of ROM design IP.​
• For instance, in November 2019, STMicroelectronics launched its new generation of EEPROM memory chips for wireless and IoT applications. Microchip Technology’s subsidiary Atmel’s family of EEPROM chips are SPI compatible, offer max write cycles of 5ms and data retention of 100 years. These chips provide 4,096 bits of serial EEPROM and 8-byte page write. In July 2019, Europe-based NXP also launched a 4Mbit serial EEPROM that offers WLCSP like the M95M04-DR.

Key Market Trends

Increasing Demand For Enterprise Storage Applications to Drive the Growth for MRAM

• Enterprise storage is witnessing significant growth in demand, due to the rise in IoT, AI, and big data applications. The introduction of advanced wireless networks, such as 5G, is expected to further increase the demand in the data center as well as the edge. ​The current enterprise storage hardware market is dominated by prominent vendors, such as HPE, Dell EMC, and NetApp, which sell traditional storage arrays, along with all-flash options, software-defined solutions (SDS), and hyperconverged infrastructure (HCI). ​
• Businesses are expected to register double-digit growth in the next two years, and by 2022, an additional 20% of the companies plan to use cloud storage infrastructure, due to an increase in the demand for high-capacity hard disk drives, all-flash storage, and cloud services, according to Spiceworks. ​A large share of the enterprise storage demand is driven by cloud storage, and the adoption of cloud storage in the enterprise sector is expected to witness exponential growth over the forecast period. According to Spiceworks, about 39% of the businesses use cloud storage infrastructure and over 20% of the enterprises plan to do so by 2022. ​
• As the price of all-flash storage is falling, the demand for high-performance solutions is increasing. Currently, about 18% of the enterprises use all-flash storage arrays, and in addition, 14% are planning to move to the all-flash array.
• Such developments and the proliferation of the existing storage technologies, such as HDDs and SSDs, are expected to boost the market demand. However, recently, eNVM witnessed an increased roll-out. Some NVMe-oF solutions are becoming hybrid flash and HDD-based systems, which are increasingly using three bit per cell and four bit per cell NAND for high-density flash memory applications, according to Forbes.

Asia-Pacific to Witness Highest Growth

• Semiconductor sales in the Asia Pacific region, excluding China and Japan, during 2019 stood at USD 113.9 billion, according to SIA. Apart from these, the semiconductor sales in China alone during 2019 stood at USD 143.7 billion. Such developments in the region are further augmenting the demand for various electronic products in the region. ​
• In addition to this, the region's demand for various storage solutions is increasing significantly and expected to be the major driver behind the global demand for enterprise storage solutions along with industrial demand for memory solutions. For example, in April 2020, Alibaba announced USD 28.2 billion dollars in data centers aiming to speed up the Covid-19 recovery in the region.
• Apart from this, China is one of the global leaders in OSAT owing to JCET, which accounts for a prominent share of the country's revenue from the semiconductor industry. Apart from China, Taiwan is another major player in the semiconductor industry, which is home to prominent regional foundries such as TSMC and also national foundries operated by various Semicon vendors. According to MOF (Taiwan), the total import value of semiconductor manufacturing equipment in the country during 2018 stood at USD 7.59 billion.
• Taiwan is also majorly an OSAT player, and in recent years the technological shift in the regional enterprises is empowering the design IP base in the country. TSMC has formed alliances and partnerships with various design and IP providers; also, the company is increasingly focusing on reducing its dependence on design IP vendors. For example, TSMS and Synopsys have formed an alliance to develop a portfolio of design IP for various memory solutions

Competitive Landscape

The global SRAM and ROM Design IP market are moderately fragmented. Players in the market are innovating their offering according to the technological trends and latest developments. Moreover, they focus on strategic collaboration to increase their market share. Some of the key developments in the market are :

• In May 2020 - Mentor Graphics Corporation announced that it has achieved certification for a broad array of Mentor integrated circuit (IC) design tools for TSMC’s industry-leading N5 and N6 process technologies. In addition, Mentor’s collaboration with TSMC has extended to advanced packaging technology, further leveraging Mentor’s Calibre platform 3DSTACK packaging technology to support TSMC’s advanced packaging platforms.
• In March 2020 - Everspin Technologies Inc. amended its spin-transfer torque (STT-MRAM) joint development agreement (JDA) with GLOBALFOUNDRIES (GF), a specialty foundry. Everspin and GF were partners on 40-nm, 28-nm, and 22-nm STT-MRAM development and manufacturing processes. They updated their agreement to set the terms for a future project, on an advanced 12-nm FinFET MRAM solution.

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